Basic RAID question

I have 2 1 TB Hitachi drives in a system with a Gigabyte X58 UD5 MB. The Hitachi's are not the boot drive. I wanted to set up the Hitachi's in a RAID1 as sort of super backup drive for my photo and music collection (which is on an external). I went through the RAID setup in BIOS, put the Hitachi's in the RAID1 volume and restarted. Seemed OK. The system won't start Vista 64 but just continally reboots, like it never looks for the OS on the non-RAID drive. Is it NOT possible to have the OS on a non-RAID drive with other drives configured as a RAID1?

1. Are you using Intel ICH10R RAID/SATA ports for both the OS and data drives? (The board also has a JMicron contoller with additional SATA ports--not recommended for RAID.)

2. Was the disk mode previously set to IDE? If yes, did you do this before changing the disk mode to RAID/AHCI in the BIOS:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

3. I'd also suggest installing the Intel Matrix Storage Manager and using it. It also provides better status information.

I went through a similar process in getting RAID mode to work.

Here's the basic steps:
1. Install driver for your 2nd SATA/IDE controller (I had Jmicron)
2. Go into BIOS and put your 2nd SATA/IDE controller into AHCI mode (you must use AHCI during OS install, otherwise this won't work and you'll have to convert to AHCI/RAID first using the above link)
3. Plug your OS drive into a SATA port linked to the 2nd SATA/IDE controller
4. Make sure you can book into Windows
5. Reboot and go into BIOS again. Enable 'RAID' mode for the ICH10-R controller.
6. Windows should now detect it. Install latest Intel Matrox RAID driver & software.
7. Shut down and re-plug all your HDDs onto the ICH10-R controller
8. In BIOS switch 2nd controller back to 'IDE' if you're using a PATA optical drive.
9. Go into the RAID BIOS during post to setup your RAID1 array
10. Boot into Windows and format your RAID1 array.