I am trying to build a new server around a Biostar TH61 motherboard and an Adaptec 6405E RAID controller card.

The machine booted fine from USB before the RAID card and drives were installed. After installing, on the first boot the card was detected, but then started to spit out the following message every 10 seconds:

Error: Controller Kernel Stopped Running
<< Press any key to continue ... >>

Following the troubleshooting guide I unplugged everything, reseated the card, and reattached all the drives. This time the machine is sitting on the boot screen without any error messages and flashing a cursor, but after 15 minutes of this, nothing seems to be happening. Given that there are no error messages I'm hesitant to reboot again.

Is it normal for a RAID card to sit without a status message when it firsts boots, maybe to initialise the drives or something?

The current screen output looks a bit like this:

Controller #00 found at PCI Slot:01, Bus:01, Dev:00, Func:00
Controller Model: Adaptec 6405E
Firmware Version: 5.2-0[18512]
Memory Size: 128MB
Serial number: 111111111111111
SAS WWN: 50000D1104AE9180
_

Update: So after waiting 30 minutes I've rebooted back to the Kernal Stopped Running error. Maybe time to update the RAID BIOS.