P5AD-2 Premium difficult to install OS on?

I have tried on and off all day, and it seems that this board doesn't want to accept a DVD-ROM on the second IDE channel (which is a RAID, but configured as IDE) with two hard drives on the first channel. Trying to install XP on that is impossible, first of all it's a pain to make it boot from CD. Then I get that annoying Stop 0x0000007B error right after the NTFS file system drivers are loaded. Also, with that setup I see the hard disks, but no Secondary master og slave in BIOS.

Moving the DVD-ROM to the first channel and the two hard drives to the second channel helps, but not much. This time I have no problems booting from the CD, and I get to he first installation screen, but now XP can't find any hard drives on the system! I assume this is because it need the drivers for them when they're on the second IDE channel. Still, why do I only see the DVD-ROM in BIOS, with no secondary master/slave? I do see the hard disks in the boot properties, though. Is this a very weird mobo?

I realize you're not using SATA drives but FWIW, I set up mine with the DVD-ROM on the Intel SATA1 channel and put the hard disks on the Silicon Image SATA_RAID1 and SATA_RAID2. No problem.

It turned out that the only way was to put the DVD-ROM and the first hard drive both on the first IDE channel. Especially since you can input RAID drivers under installation, but only from diskettes. Who the heck uses thos anymore?

I put my rig together last weekend and for two days couldn't figure it out til I tried putting the DVD and HDD on the primary IDE. But Asus emailed me back to my problem, see below. I wish they had put this in the manual.

"For you problem, do you connect the harddisk to PRI_RAID connector? If so when you install OS do you install a driver as the following? If not please install the driver and try to boot up from harddisk to have a test.
1.Please use make ITE8212 Driver Disk in the support CD to make a floppy disk driver(the driver can help to recognise IDE devices connecting to PRI_RAID and SEC_RAID connectors) for Raid.
2.Insert OS installation CD install OS, when "press F6 and put a floppy ......" display on the screen, please press F6 and insert the floppy disk you've made and install the driver.
3.After installation you can install OS as normal."

Also, although the two RAID IDE ports can be configured to be normal IDE ports in the bios, they won't appear as 2nd of 3rd IDE ports but will be detected by the IT8212 scan as Drives 1-4 during boot-up.