Help please with RAID

After many many hours of trying to get my raid setup to work ive finally given up. I have a p5ld2 motherboard with vista and the intel matrix drivers installed. My OS is on a seperate disk. I'm trying to set up the raid drives just for storage. I set up the two maxtor 200 gigs for raid0 by doing the ctrl-i during boot. When logged into vista the raid drive is not listed under my computer. It is listed as a drive in the device manager. In disk management the drive shows up also but as not initialized and with no allocated space. Trying to initialize the disk causes it to become basic. When trying to convert to striped i get an error saying the operation is invalid. Im trying to setup harware raid btw. Any help would be greatly appreciated.