gigabyte 7DXR problem with RAID

hi. i am trying to build a system on a gigabyte 7dxr using raid 0. i am using two wd 40 gb caviar drives each connected on a separate ide cable to ide channel 3 and 4 of the mobo. i have the jumpers on the drives set to single drive (neutral storage position).

i created the array and fdisk'ed it successfully. i began the setup process for windows 2000 pro with the four setup floppies. i provided setup with the promise raid drivers on another floppy. the array was detected and i formatted the C drive with ntfs successfully. setup then asked for the win2k cd and copied some files onto the C drive. it reached its first reboot.

upon this first reboot the machine simply freezes at the very end of the bios screens (right after the 'verifying dmi pool data...' line) when it should boot from drive C on the array. in addition, it now refuses to boot from floppy or anything else.

my boot order is set to floppy->raid/scsi. i have tried changing the boot order to only raid/scsi but this was useless. i have tried setting the jumpers on both drives to master but this caused the array to disappear resulting in a 'no hard drive found' error.

i am perplexed as to why i can detect the array, format it, and even have setup copy files to it, but not get it to boot. i tried sending an email to gigabyte tech support in taiwan, but that was two days ago... i doubt that i will hear from them. if anyone has any ideas PLEASE help as i have exhausted every case that i could think of by grueling trial and error.

various other notes:
the raid/ata100 jumper on the mobo is set to raid and the promise jumper on the mobo is set to enable.
the array is bootable according to the promise fasttrack utility.
the primary dos partion is active in fdisk.

thanks a lot
-eddie