Strange Behavior from ICH9 RAID

Hi guys,

The first issue i am having is with an intel DQ35JO motherboard with a C2Q 6600 (Kentsfield) on it. The machine is currently running Win2003EE SP2 (32-bit) and is the Exchange Server as well as the host for a removable hard drive for offsite backups for one of my clients (Exchange2003 and NTBackup). The problem i am having is that everytime that the removable hard drive (Seagate SATAII 1TB Barracuda 32MB/7200.11) is swapped with an identical drive, the RAID 1 Mirror for the system drive appears to break temporarily and then begin rebuilding. At first i had the raid on the ICH9 controller as well as the backup drive and the DVD-RW drive. Since then i have moved the backup drive to an add-on Silicon image SiI3132 PCI-E controller. Still, for som reason i get the same S*** every time that the backup drive is changed (every two weeks). This has really been bugging me for a while and intel's online chat is of no help.

The second issue is somewhat related to the first. I have tried to use a different machine to do the backups. This machine is using a K8N-E Deluxe with an Athlon64 2800+ Newcastle (Socket 754). The board has an nForce3 with a 250Gb for the chipset. it currently has a mirror with WD SATA1 drives (one of which appears to have suffered a major head crash and is now NFG)for the system on the boards integrated SiI3114 controller. I have attempted to install the seagate drive mentioned in the first problem to use this machine for the backup to eliminate the first problem but no luck. When the drive is connected to the nforce sata controller (not RAID mode) the drive does not get detected even with all sata gen1 limit jumpers in place. When the drive is inserted within windows (using a removable tray or hot plugging) the machine locks up and nothing responds. I have used these boards for other clients in previous builds and i know that with the IDE SW driver installed the nforce sata ports are treated as removable drives and work flawlessly. The only thing is that previously the drives used were SATA 1 and i can't remember if they were NCQ or not. This one irritates me as it seems so ridiculous that a drive that passes all diagnostics, and is detected without issue on other boards that i have, would not be detected with the newest bios release on this machine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as i am pulling my hair out at the moment.

Cheers