DEL POWEREDGE SC1420, RAID 5, AND GENTOO

Recently got a Dell PowerEdge SC1420 for one of my jobs. It has a CERC 6-channel RAID controller which I set up as a 3 disk RAID 5 for file storage and backups. The thing shipped with 4 disks on the RAID, but I took one off and plugged it directly into one of the SATA ports on the motherboard, because I wanted to keep OS and files separate. When I was instlaling Gentoo from the LiveCD I could see the RAID just fine, but after getting a functional 2.6 kernel up and running, I tried compiling in the aacraid module I got kernel panic on startup, something to the tune of

VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(8,3)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,3)

Whatever that means. After many unsuccessful attempts to find the perfect configuration of non-conflicting kernel modules, I finally found that simply compiling aacraid as a module and loading it separately fixed the problem. The root partition on my separate OS drive was found, and the RAID was recognized. Huzzah.