[freakitchen]

Head into the bios and then to "standard cmos features" there, you'll be able to autodetect your drives by hitting "enter" where the IDE drives are listed.

With your motherboard, the SATA drivers are already incorporated, so you should see all your drives listed (as IDE 2,3,4,5 etc). Plug the drives into the "orange" controllers on the board, these are controlled by the nforce chipset. Also, it's a good idea to plug the opticals into IDE2, rather than the Master.

While you're there, check your temperatures under "Hardware health". In fact, do this very quickly, very high temps show that you've seated your heatsink incorrectly and its time to turn off and try again.

All partitioning of the HD can be done via the Windows XP install. Make your partitions, then choose on which one you want to install windows.

As for RAID, there are different types. I'm no expert and you should google something along the lines of "explain RAID", or search the forum. One example of RAID is a way to run 2 HDs as one, and supposedly decrease response times. It is generally considered though, that the advantages of these are outweighed by their disadvantages. At any rate, your Raptor drive should be more than fast enough.

Freakitchen