Let me thank anyone in advance for ansewring this post, please excuse my ignorance if the ansewr just jumps out at the more knowledgeable mems of the community, ok here goes,  
System info, Msi P4N diamond mobo,p4@3.2ghz, 2gigs kensington ram,2 deskstar hd's 80gb ea.(sata) BENQ dvd burner, Sony Dvd rom, chaintech 6600gt128mb 450watt atx v2.0 power supply,  
now comes the problem, put everthing together, installed xp on hd#1 attempted to install raid drivers as instructed, when raid is enabled in bios i get a disk read error and i have to ctrl,alt,del. to restart and the only way to get passed this is to go back into bios and disable raid then it works fine, heres the wierd part when i started the system the first time evrything worked fine bothdvd drives showed up, after i tried to enable raid and then disabled it, only one dvd drive shows up, the other shows in bios but not in device mgr., i have the latest bios,checked the cable, switched the drives, tried runing the opposite drive in slave and the other as master, the sony always shows in bios but never in my computer or device mgr. i know the drive is working becuse i ran all the install cd from it originally. am i crazy? should i pay a professional to fix this? can anyone help?  
THankyou thank you THANKYOU

You only use RAID mode for doing a RAID array.  You have matching drives, if you wanted to RAID them you'd have to enable RAID for the RIGHT controller (some drives have more than one) and then enter RAID BIOS to make the array.  You would no longer have "hd#1" and 2, you'd have a single raid array (presented as one drive) that contains two physical drives.
 
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i have enabled raid through the nvidia raid controller, when i boot up if i hold f10 for raid options, i showed a healthy array as just one disk the problem is as soon as i try to boot after enabling raid i get a disk read error. thanks for the input though , always appreciated.

There's a great RAID FAQ in the HDD forum - have you read it?
 
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Unplug the benq dvd burner. I had some problem with mine and aerly firmware not being compatible with nforce4. Once windows is installed, go in devices manager, and select standard microsoft drivers for the ata controller. then plug the benq back, and you should be able to use it or you can download the latest firmware that fix that problem.
 
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okay i tried to change back to the msoft controller and no dice , but its always worth a shot.

But do it is working without the Benq plugged in? If yes, you can try to update the firmware of your burner using another machine.
 
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