so now that it's actually recognizing the drives and i need to rebuild it again w/ the new config, i'm running the system partition setup and it's asking for the "Drive Array Configuration" disk. there are several disks to download from the compaq support site that match that generic description to some degree, but none of them is accepted as the "right" one by the persistent Please Insert prompt.
anyone ever feel like their whole life is a fractal, a cohesive structure wherein you can find the same pattern repeated everywhere within it at some scale?