Installing XP or 2K with large 80 GB partitions

Ive just started building my new PC. I had to wait for my rma'd power supply to get here cause it was DOA. My system is as follows:

Northwood 1.6a
Abit Th7II-Raid
2x80GB WD800JB w/ 8 meg cache

When I boot to my XP disk is tells me NTDLR is missing. The KB has an article that talks about upgrading from 95 or 98 but im trying to install fresh on 2 brand new drives. Ive got the drives in the onboard RAID IDE slots and the RAID BIOS is set to RAID 0. This would equal 160 GB more than the 137 GB problem I think I have heard about before.

Does this sound like a BIOS problem?
Does it stem from the 2 80GB drives on RAID creating a 160 GB partition?
How can I install XP with my setup. I have already flashed the BIOS with the release from abit's website.

[MIK3]

i do think it is a BIOS problem. some mobo's do that, others don't. try usin the boot up disks for XP and it should work fine.

It looks as though i might need to get a third hard drive to use a boot drive..... I hope this isnt my only alternative. I wish someone knew about this.

It ended up being a bad cd-rom drive. I am glad I finally got it working.

FYI the 2 WD800JB's (80 GB western digital drives with 8 MB cache) ROCK! The fastest setup I have ever witnessed bar none.

[vee_ess]

Are those the Special Editions? They are supposd to be the fastest hard drives to date. They beat out any ATA133's and whip SCSI's. It just goes to show that the Bus isn't the slow part of the HD setup, like most thought. It is the actual platters themselves.

Yes the 80-100-120 Western Digital w/8mb cache are SE drives.
I could not believe my eyes two or three weeks ago. Best Buy, CompUSA,and Frys had these HD's on sale (100mb SE) for $99.00 after rebates. That is $1.00 per gig. Limit one per customer, I read about this in the early Sunday paper, by the time we could get there all these were sold. We live about 50miles from these stores and about 80miles from Frys. So we did not get one, and no rain checks.

[vee_ess]

I think I'll keep some cash in reserves in case I see a deal like that on them. I'll get 2 or 4 and RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 them.

When you install W2k, one of the first operations asked you is "do you have raid or scsi drivers to install, if so press F6 now" Or something as to this effect. You must press F6 and continue with the install of W2k. Before the end of the install process you will be asked to place the raid or scsi drive disk in the proper drive. This will install the raid or scsi drivers, Then when the system reboot's the raid controller will be recognized and the raid bios screen is available to you to set up the proper BOOT DRIVE. Then you will not get the message that NTLDR is missing. Because W2k will know where to find it.