Prob w/ SATA & IDE drives...

I recently purchased and installed a pair of 36.7GB WD Raptors and set them up in RAID 0. They work just fine and I'm happy w/ them. I formatted them and installed Win XP Pro on them. I had planned on using my old 80GB IDE drive as a multimedia drive... For some reason I couldn't format the drive. During bootup, it asked me which WinXP to boot because the old 80GB was still a bootable drive. Once I selected to boot from the RAID array, it would go into windows... the RAID was C: and the other drive was F:... Everything was fine so far. When I right clicked it to format it, it went through the whole format process and then told me there was an error and it couldn't format it. So Then I borrowed PartitionMagic from a friend thinking it was more powerful than Windows. It had an error as well but after the error, Drive F: disappeared from My Computer. I rebooted and it said "Error Loading Operating System". Then I turned it off, unplugged the 80GB completely and the system happily boots into Windows...

Now every time I plug in the other drive, it says "Error Loading Operating System".

My question is, how can I format that drive as just a second hard drive?

On a side note, I thought perhaps the problem was that it was trying to boot to that drive and that it was just a boot sequence problem. Unfortunately, the BIOS gives me the option to boot to HDD-0, HDD-1, HDD-2, HDD-3 & so on... I have no idea which "HDD" my RAID array is... there's no option to boot to RAID...

Please Help me out here, guys... It's not urgent, but I wanna get the thing working...

ur doing everything right it should have worked. there should be a boot from SATA option in bios. u may try to format from boot. i do it with the disc that came with seagate drive but partition magic has an option to make a floppy boot disc or i think the windows xp setup disc has the option to format drive right before installing u could do that then quit. gook luck.

Change the boot option to SCSA. It sounded like before it was booting the IDE hard drive and then recognizing the RAID and giving you the option to choose.

Problem solved... I had to set the boot drive to "SCSI" and then format the disk using Partition Magic... everything is good now

thanx