HDD Installation Problem

Hi,

I've recently bought two Samsung Spinpoint 500gb (SATA) drives to run in RAID along side my current Seagate Barracuda 80gb (IDE) which has XP SP2 on. As my mobo (Biostar M7NCD Pro) does not support SATA, I've also bought a PCI SATA card.

I installed the card in my machine then booted up and installed the drivers - everything working fine.
I then installed my two new hard drives and waited to see what happened.
A screen came up with the name of my new PCI SATA card at the top and beneath this, my two new hard drives had been recognised and I was being asked if I wanted to run RAID (by pressing Ctrl+S or F4 - neither of which did anything at all). The screen blanked after a few seconds and just hung, not booting or anything.
I figured that this was a bit strange and disconnected my new drives and tried booting again. Booted up into XP same as ever.
I reconnected my two drives and booted into Partition Magic (6.1 if it matters) which CAN SEE both new drives - and formatted them into NTFS for me.

BIOS does not recognise the new hard drives (but then might not anyway because they're plugged into a PCI card).
The is no conflicts of IRQ's or anything.

PCI SATA controller card chipset is; Silicon Image SiI 3512 SATA RAID Controller.

Is it possible that my hard drive ceases to recognise my IDE (as seems to be the case) when my SATA's are plugged in. This would make sense of the hanging situatin if the BIOS is trying to to boot from hard-disks with nothing on them.

Please help - i'm really stuck.

and thanks!

hi, thanks for your reply.
I've just tried what you recommended and my boot order is fine - i've tried a number of different sequences to see if any get a different result but it's still the same. No option anywhere actually gives me the option to select a pci controller. if i'm honest, i don't know how to enter the BIOS on the controller card. anybody have any ideas? (the manual doesn't explain it)