GA-P55-UD3L bios doesn't see SATA Hdd - can't load XP

[puterfx]

I want to set one Sata hdd up as a dual boot and then have 4- 500G SATA hdds in 2 RAID5 setups. To start with, I installed the o/s SATA hdd, went into the bios to set it for RAID so I could load the drivers and did not see the there.  My IDE CDRW was there but not the SATA hdd.  When I tried to install the o/s, it said the hdd could not be found.  Wehn I went back into the bios and looked at the first boot device, it showed the hdd.  I had it plugged into SATA 0 on the m/b so I changed it to SATA 5 as a long shot.  No difference.  I took another SATA hdd with an existing o/s and looked in the bios and got the same results but when I let the system try to boot up, Windows XP tried to start but then blue screened which is understandable because it was from a completely different setup.  However, when I tried to boot from the install cd and do a repair/install, it could not find the hdd.  I also have an IDE HDD so I put that in and the bios saw it as well as the install cd. Does that mean I can't boot from a SATA drive?  That's the same setup I have now and was trying to get away from it. The only thing I haven't done is disconnect the IDE CDRW. Darn frustrating I tell ya!

Any thoughts?

[t00nCiNaToR]

This may sound silly but you did an F6 at the beginning of the XP setup to load the SATA drivers?

***Edit*** Sorry the above statement may be sound silly but I just read someone superglued their CPU to the heatsink so anything is possible.

- When you boot, the Intel SATA/RAID page that loads after your post/ Boot splashscreen, can you see all your SATA drives there? You should see a list of all of them initializing including any Non-RAID SATA drives.
*** If you don't see this the below things will never work.

- I have never booted to a RAID5 setup but I imagine it works.
- If you have a Vista or Win7 DVD around, do they see the drives during install?
- If you load the latest Acronis Disk Director suite(BootCD), does it see the drives?

[puterfx]

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