thanks for the suggestions. i was able to boot to raid controller as long as all drives were disconnected. i had to clear the raid card config cache, reseat the drives, refresh the page to get the foreign config option, imported foreign config and it worked. i had tried to import the foreign config twice and neither worked because i hadn't cleared the config cache on the card yet.
we updated the bios to the latest version for this 2900 and now it won't get past the page where is shows processor and memory. it gets past the dell logo screen but then won't move past the next screen. pressing F2 changes the words at the top to "entering setup" but it doesn't do anything past that. we left it like this for at least 2 days.  we have disconnected everything except monitor keyboard/mouse. when we remove all hard drives, it moves past this screen to the raid screen that says it is missing drives, please check cables...etc. please help, this is a production SBS 2008 server.
can't boot 2900 after bios update