SATA install help

I just bought a DFI KT600-AL motherboard to replace an even older Shuttle
KT35GR. The first board I got was bad and wouldnt post. Exchange. All is
right with the second. But I just bought a 160GB Samsung SATA drive for the
onboard RAID controller and for whatever reason I cant install the drive in
WinXP Pro. The controller sees the drive most of the time as the right drive
but sometimes it will power up and show garbage in the name field both in
the bios boot sequence and in the raid initialization screen. I thought it
would be a simple matter of formatting the drive with the Disk Manager
Utility in windoze, but it returns an error saying the viasraid.sys did not
respond in the time alloted. Or some such nonsense. Does anyone know what
might be going on with this setup??

DFI KT600-AL w/VIA 3267 southbridge w/integrated SATA RAID
Athlon XP+ 2400 OC to 2.239GHz
Antec SmartPower 350W PSU
Creative SBAudigy
ATI Radeon 8500LE
512MB Viking PC2100 DDR
20GB and 45GB WD Caviar drives
Liteon 4x DVD+/-RW
5 case fans

Trying to install Samsung 160GB SATA Drive

I read somewhere it might be a ram issue, but I ran three different mem
tests and a mem burn in test and all came up fine. And I do have the latest
drivers for everything. Next step is the BIOS.

Thanks for any help