New Raid user here. I understand how it works for the most part but I just need help/suggestions on how to set it up. When planning the design of the webserver, I failed to notice what type of drives I needed and the correct MB. I purchased a MB that is compatible with RAID SATA. I purchased IDE drives

. So I'm having to settle for a software raid. Heres my specs.
AMD Opteron Duel Core Box 165
2GB Ram Expandable to 4GB
3 300GB Western digital 7200RPM IDE Drives
I want to use Centos 4.4
I'll use some sort of control panel. Any suggested free ones would be appreciated until I can afford Cpanel. Nuonce has Blue Quartz but thats another issue.
I understand that I need to make software Raid partitons to create a Raid device. But what other partitions and how much space for each? Again I want to setup a RAID 5 array.
/
/boot
/ext
/swap
Raid
Also if all the boot and other partitions are only on the first disk, what happens if that first drive fails? When a drive does fail on a software raid, how do you start the recover process?
Thanks in Advance.