General :: New Install Dumps To Grub CLI?

I am trying to make a clean install of linux on three new 500G HDs. Because the last failure caused loss of my wife's pictures, I'm in the dog house. I know, I know. Back-up, back-up, back-up.I'm trying to set up a Raid 5 as partial insurance against disk failure (along with a frequent back up schedule). A friend suggested that I put 4-5 partitions in the raid array to aid in recovery if a disk fails (/boot, /, /var, /home, and swap). I know that swap doesn't get 'raided'. I've looked at 50+ tutorials on how to set up raid5 from a clean install and after installing the whole system. Nothing has helped or even addressed this issue so far.

Problem is that I have now tried installing 4 different flavors of linux (Ubuntu, Mint, and a couple of distros of Fedora) with the custom disk partitioning as mentioned above. I've tried installing grub on the MBR and the first partition (/boot). I've ensured that it pointed to the correct partition to find the kernel (/). I've tried everything that I can think of, and at every reboot, I get dumped to the grub CLI after bios post, regardless of distro. I cannot get the system to load the kernel.