Installing with RAID

[oldpopsie]

I have a PC Chips A13 motherboard, a 250GB PATA hard drive, two 1TB SATA hard drives, one SATA DVD writer, and a PATA DVD writer.
The two PATA devices are in the one IDE controller/cable and work fine.
As there are only two SATA headers on the motherboard and I have three devices, I bought a Silicone Image 4 port SATA Raid controller thinking I could set up the two SATA drives as a RAID array for my data. The only problem is, wheneve I connect anything to it, I cant get beyond the BIOS/boot point. Al I get is the SATA RAID controller ID, a message to press F4 or Ctrl+S to set up the RIAD, and the ID for the device(s) connected, but nothing happens when I press either of those keys.
What am I doing wrong?
If I leave the controller card disconnected, I can boot, but when I go to partition the disk, (I am using SUSE 11.1), and click on the raid icon in the expert partitioner, I get a message that there are no suitable devices available. All of the drives shoe in the partitioner and I can do regular partitioning on them.
How do I get all of my SATA devices connected and RAID set up the way I want to?