you are right. the drives are HW configured.
i found out that i did not have the Intel Matrix Storage Management (IMSM) Raid driver software. i downloaded it from intel.com and it worked like a charm. from WinXP i ran the driver, it recognized the two non-raid disks, asked how raid to be configured, and it was done. after that, i went into computer management, storage and formatted the now raid0 1TB volume. the machine is now singing...
thanks.