Nvidia Boot Agent problem on GA-K8NF9 Ultra

My pc crashed on me the other day big time whilst it was being used , it just froze up never to reboot again. It trys to but just keeps restarting all the time . Im running a SATA RAID 0 with the above mentioned motherboard with 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptor drives . I first suspected the drives maybe a problem despite the fact that they are only just over a year old but im now looking at a mobo problem . Firstly i tried to run chkdsk but cant get windows to see the hard drive . I boot from cd , hit F6 , and pop the drivers on the floppy and all seems ok until i get to the part where you either re-install windows or run the repair facilities . The strange thing is even after loading the raid drivers off the floppy windows will not see a hard drive . OK i thought , i know how to prove this . I got out of the cupboard my 2 x 80GB Seagate Barracudas which the Raptors replaced (these also being a SATA RAID 0 ) but which still have all my old bootable system on including all drivers . I plugged thses drives in about 6 months ago to retrieve something off them and they booted like clockwork , i got what i needed and then put my Raptors back again so i know these worked perfectly . The strange thing is the motherboard now also refuses to boot up from these drives also which is even more confusing . The irony is that id already ordered a couple of 150GB RAPTORS before the crash as i needed more space and they arrived the day after it crashed - typical !!! Now i decided to start again and re-install windows on my new drives but yet again after adding the raid drivers from the floppy (F6) windows cannot install because yet again it cannot see a HDD . Getting well pissed off at this point i decided to try other options . Firstly i deleted the array off the drives and started again and put it back as it was , STRIPING , 64K BLOCKS and made it Bootable , still nothing although this time i get the Nvidia Boot Agent message and after a few mins tells me there is no bootable HDD . I reset the cmos on the mobo and went back into the bios and set up the SATA raid again , still the same result .The strange thing is it does tell me that the RAID 0 Nvidia striped 69GB is Healthy and if i unplug either drive it tells me there is a problem . Is it possible that my onboard raid controller has given up the ghost ? I have read quite a few of the posts on these forums of people having similar experiences with booting and the Nvidia Boot Agent message but am almost out of options . Any help appreciated .Sorry to go on a bit but i wanted to be as thorough as possible so as to increase my chances of help. Thanks guys , heres hoping . Steve Vangorph

Gigabyte GA-K8NF9 Ultra Mobo
Athlon 4600x2 Dual Core Processor
Windows XP Pro SP2
2GB Ram
Radeon X1800XT Graphics
2 x Western Digital Raptors (36GB Raid0)
480Watt PSU