Thanks for prep'ing the kernel, Takashi. After installing that kernel, building a new initrd, adding hpsa_allow_any=1, I was able to boot the system and see the /dev/sda device appear. So far so good. However, the system is unable to complete boot-up because systemd is expecting a device called /dev/cciss/c0d0p1 to be mounted. I guess this is the auto-generated mount-unit based on fstab. I tried changing the fstab to mount /dev/sda1 as root, but that didn't help.