Help plz Serial ATA configuration P4P800 DLX

I have 2 new maxtor 80GB serial ATA HDD. I have connected them to my new P4P800 dlx board, P4 2.6c cpu, 2x512MB sticks of Kingston Hyper X 3500 DDRAM. I have gone into BIOS to the IDE Configuration screen and set Onboard IDE Operate Mode to = Enhanced Mode and Configure S-ATA as RAID = yes.
Exit and save.
Then I have looked for the alleged message that is supposed to appear during POST "Press <Ctrl-l> to enter Raid configuration Utiltiy" I do not see this message. By the way is that control L or control I, the font used in the manual leaves that open to interpretation.
Anyway, neither of the S-ATA HDD are being found by the BIOS.
What am I missing here? What have I forgotten to do?

Your helpful suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

I have the same board and bios 1009. Just under the setting "set as raid" you should see a setting for enabling the rom. Do that then restart, you have to be quick to get the keystroke in time. the letter is 'i' . Also you will have to install the raid driver into the setup routine for XP to recognize the raid. You will have to use the CD that came with the MB to make an install disk for the driver. The file you want is "makedisk.exe". Located on the CD in Drivers/chipset/IAA. Use this disk when you go to install XP and it gives you the option to install additional drivers by hitting F6 (I think)You will have to be quick. I hope everything is correct. I had the same problem at first.

Thanks Driver54. I must have missed the part of the instructions telling me to enable the rom. I will give it a try.

Driver54 your advice got me further along.

I got into windows setup where I pressed F6 and later "S" to get makedisk.exe to run from the floppy in Drive A. However, I get an
Error message:
File \winxp\viaraid.sys caused an unexpected error (18) at line 2108 in d:\xpsp1\base\boot\setup\oemdisk.c.
press any key to continue.

Now what?

from bad to worse

Things are getting even worse now.
I can get into BIOS and after that I can do the control i to get to the raid utility to set the drives to RAID after I exit the utility all I get is a black screen with a white blinking bar in the upper left corner of the screen and nothing else happens.
I tried switching out the CD player so it is not that. I can't get to load windows.

There is hope

Continueing the setup saga . . .
I have finally gotten to the Windows loading screen by removing the board's battery and moving that jumper that clears BIOS settings. I created a RAID 0 useing all the space on both drives. (Is that wise and if there is a better way to divide the space? I could not figure a way to partition the space in the utility. Hope I can use a third party partition software like Partition Magic to created smaller partitions.)
Hit F6, Hit S, it loaded the stuff from the floppy. It goes to load Windows; and . . . . .
I get a message that "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed on your computer."
Setup can not continue. To quit Setup, press F3.

Help please.

I am defeated

I give up. Guess no RAID for me.

Wow! You have been having some problems! I am sorry to hear that. I may have just gotten lucky, but I never had windows do that to me. The first time I tried to install windows I had to abort the install then when I tried to do the install the second time I could not use the cd-rom. I had to go to MS website and download the program for creating the 6 or 7 floppies to install XP. My attempt to install the SATA raid went well on the second PC using the same board. I have two other hard drives for data. If you are sure that BIOS is seeing the raid volume after you configure the raid volume and you got the Intel raid installed with setup of XP I am not sure why windows did not see it. Try not to install any other raid drivers until you have your OS installed.(just add the one for the Intel SATA raid)