Problem with Epox 8k3a+ onboard RAID

[Bulldozer2003]

I have an Epox 8k3a+ with an onboard highpoint raid controller, HPT370/2. I just got a new 250GB HD and want to use it along with my 30GB and 100GB. I first enabled the RAID controller in BIOS and attached the 100 and 250gb to the raid as master and slave, while my 30gb and cdrw were both masters on the two IDE channels. When I rebooted I got the highpoint bios screen which detected the drives and then just hung there, I could not Ctrl+H into highpoint setup before or after detection. I then attached just the 250 to the raid and the same thing occured. I don't want to do real RAID, just a bunch of drives because I read attaching a faster ata133 HDD to the same channel as an ata33 CDROM will slow down the HDD to ata33.
What am I missing?
I want to keep my 30gb because it is a nice maxtor diaomand max and the 100 and 250 are western digitals that do horrible in throughput testing (on the order of 20,000 for the maxtor and 2,000 for the WDs, any ideas about why would be welcome).
I never used the on-board raid before, but wanted the option for this reason exactly (money prevented me from having two or three drives a couple years ago).
Any ideas?

Thanks
Brian

 

[Bulldozer2003]

Anybody???

 

[Bulldozer2003]

🙁

 

[DAPUNISHER]

It seems like centuries since I had that board so I'm not on top of it anymore. I'm not exactly certain what config you have them attached to from your discritption so I would start by hooking the new drive up as master/single on the 2nd controller so that both are master/single on seperate controllers and see if that resolves it. If not you need make sure you have the most recent bios, and that 48bit LBA works properly with it as I remember some formatting bugs and such.