Hello guys, after a lot of confusion and my best friend saying that he comes to your site for answers to his problems all the time i figured i give it a try here as well.

i recently purchased two SATA2 WD 80gig hdds from newegg to have them set up in a RAID 0 array as my main HDDs for my OS. After recieving the drives and installing into my computer (MSI NF4 SLi Platinum, 3500+ OC'ed 2.4, 2gigs of ddr, and 2x6800GT in SLi) i have the drives on SATA 1 + 2 like i said in Raid 0, i also have the 3 IDE drives installed as well as just storage drives for right now. anyway my point of the problem is that after i install windows to the raid array and it goes to boot into windows after a restart Windows will only boot into itself on the HDDs if the windows installation CD is in the drive and the CD drive is set as the first device to boot up on start up. I'm very confused by this, i never had this problem when i was just installing the OS onto IDE drives. also on top of that i can't have the raid array as the first hdd to be booted to, i have to have it on the bottom of the list after my IDE hdds basically it looks like this in my bios HDD boot sequence

1st HDD device - IDE 0 Master
2nd HDD device - IDE 0 Slave
3rd HDD device - IDE 1 Slave
4th HDD device - SCSI Raid device 150gig

That’s just the order that works for the HDD priority, and the overal boot sequence I have set up just to have windows boot off of the raid array into the desktop is as follows:

1st boot device - CDRom
2nd boot device - HDD
3rd boot device - disabled
4th boot device - disabled

So basically in laiman's terms, my OS will only boot to the windows xp pro desktop on my new RAID 0 array if the "windows xp pro installation CD" is in the disc drive and if that disc drive is marked as the first boot device and if the RAID array is set at the last HDDs on HDD priority list. Whenever I try to start up my pc and boot into windows without the windows installation disc in the CD drive or have HDD set as the 1st boot device instead of the CDROM drive, I receive a message stating that windows is missing a file from a the windows directory or that it is corrupted.

Also I've noticed in the disk management screen once I've booted to the desktop and right click on my computer onto manage, that program states that "Windows" is installed onto the raid 0 array, but it has my master IDE 1 HDD as the boot device. Should I remove the IDE HDDs altogether during the installation so that nothing during the windows installation is written to the IDE drives? My current IDE config is:

IDE 0 master - 120gig WD
IDE 0 slave - 120gig WD
IDE 1 master - NEC DVD burner
IDE 1 slave - 300gig Maxtor

the two drives on IDE 1 are set as cable select. I was thinking of getting rid of my two 120gig hdds and replacing them with my the 250gig hdd from my external drive, just to free up space and allow better airflow around my HDDS. But as I was saying with the numerous drives would it be better for me to get rid of the the 120s on my IDE 0 and just have the DVD burner on that drive and have 250 and 300 on the secondary IDE. Because I would like my RAID 0 array to both have windows and boot options on that array instead of what I said before of that the windows installation installed windows on the RAID array but has the 120 on IDE 0 master set as boot via what I can see in "Disk Management"

Please someone help me, I spent 6 hrs yesterday trying to make it all work the way I want it to work, with no luck only being able to boot to the desktop via the disc being in the cdrom drive at startup. once again PLEASE SOMEONE HELP ME I’m LOST!

Jumpers on IDE or SATA, i've messed around on the jumpers on IDE but just to make them Master, slave or CS. I haven't tried putting jumpers on the SATA hdds, because my mobo supports SATA2 and they are SATA2 HDDs, if i don't get any good solutions to this horrible problem of mine i will try to revert the SATA2 drives into SATA 150 drives with the jumpers...

If you pull the ide drives and set the sata raid as first boot device does it work?