How to get started when nstaller won't find RAID

Engineeringtech

I'm not a programmer. All I have ever done with Linux is is use it. And I don't have much experience at that. I have very limited understanding of the terminal interface, limited experience installing programs and no experience installing drivers. I have a new whitebox with a Highpoint 2710 RAID card, and a freshly partitioned and formatted RAID 1 array. There is no OS installed on it. I want to install Ubuntu 9.04 or 10.10 onto that machine. Unfortunately, the installation disks do not detect the array, and I was told it was because the installation disk lacks the drivers. Highpoint has given me no support whatsoever. I have a Ubuntu driver floppy disk created with a downoad from their website, but have no idea how to use it. I am not even certain the driver is compatible with my specific version or kernel of Ubuntu. I can download driver source code from Highpoint. But I don't know what to do with it.

Is this ans unrealistic or impossible task for someone like me who doesn't even know how to do the most basic stuff on the command line interface?

One more thing... I am writing this on an old laptop that runs Ubuntu 9.04. Is it possible for me to compile a driver on the laptop and move it to the new machine?