28 reads and only 1 reply ... now I don't feel so bad. I've been doing this since the late 90's so I'm not a newbie but I also have learned that nothing sounds silly anymore.
1st, I went into the bios and set everything for RAID but did not see any SATA drives but I did notice bios was F1 and latest rev was F4.
2nd, when I boot up, no SATA drives are recognized, only my IDE CDRW
3rd, I don't have a floppy drive so wouldn't help to press F6. ( Even if I had a floppy, I couldn't update the bios because the update was 2 meg - too big for a floppy disk.) BTW, knowing I didn't have a floppy and needed the sata/raid drivers, I did make a slipstreamed copy of XP with all my drivers to do an unattended install.
I removed all the SATA hdds and put in an IDE Hdd and it was recognized in the bios, at boot up and by WINXP setup so I installed the o/s and drivers without the RAID and updated the bios with @bios.
Now that that's done, that'll fix the bios not seeing the SATA hdds, right? NOT! So, I'm sitting there with 5 SATA hdd's installed and not seeing any of them so I figure I'll try the install anyway with the slipstreamed CD. The install stops again saying no hard drive can be found. So now I'm really thinking that my m/b is messed up but I go online again. (Google is my best friend!) and I stumble on a post about the same issue with Intel boards as I was having and it also pointed to pressing F6. At that point, I remember I had a floppy drive in an old junk computer in the garage so I pulled it, hooked it up to the new computer, put in the driver disk, hit F6 and installed XP just fine to the o/s SATA drive. I hooked up the other 4 SATA drives, rebooted the computer and it picked up the 4 drives which I had previously had installed in RAIDS in my other computer, recognized the previous RAIDs and set them up like I had planned it that way (which I had, of course).
Long story short, I went back and looked at what I had done with the slipstreamed cd and, apparently, the keyboard messed up while I was typing in the scripts.
So, t00nCiNaToR, I do appreciate your suggestions, and they probably would have helped had I not mucked things up. I will definitely keep them in my archives for future reference and they may help others who pass this way. Thanks for your response and help. It's people like you that make forums like this great