Yes, most montherboard integrated RAID solutions are really Hardware assisted Software RAID, not fully Hardware RAID, so drivers are needed for operation, that is why Open-E does not support it...

I really thing a mirror for Open-E although giving a sence of peace of mind, it's a little overkill... I boot from an IDE compact Flash and I keep a spare one imaged from the main on in case I have any problem with my servers... configuration is not stored on the boot medium but on the primary Volume Group I beliave, so if anything happens to the card I just replace it and everything works just fine, you may need to reactivate though as activation is dependant on the boot medium... You can do the same with USB pen drives...

You can boot from the demo CD and still have all your config and data working while you correct the problem.