Abit KN9 Ultra - NVIDIA MCP55 Ultra

First of all I would like to know if someone managed to use the RAID provided by this chipset with linux, I googled a little bit but couldn't find anything useful.
I have been trying for 2 months now and I am about to buy a PCI RAID controller because I really don't understand what the problem is.

My configuration is:

Abit kn9 Ultra
AMD64 3.2gb
1GB ram
1 hd Seagate 320Gb
1 hd Maxtor 320Gb


Basically I entered the bios, enabled the RAID controller and the SATA channels, entered the raid utility (through pressing f10 during post) setup a new array specifying mirror mode, installed Debian sid on one HD without even partitioning the other disk (as what I want is a RAID1). After the installation at the reboot grub get stuck printing non-stop "GRUB loading stage 1.5"
The first thing I don't understand is: shouldn't linux see just one device once the array is up? Well, during the installation I could see sda and sdb.
Another strange thing (but of course this has nothing to do with linux) happens when I try to rebuild one disk from the RAID Utility (the screen get full of strange changing ascii signs in 8 colors - very impressive) and the only
wayout is to unplug the cord (screenshot is attached).
I changed the motherboard twice, after contacting Abit in Holland, they were sure it was a defect on the MB ....
At the moment I am trying with a GRUB bootdisk with the folloqing result:
root (hd0,0)
Error 5: Partition table invalid or corrupt
if I type it again the output changes:
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
I tried find /boot/grub/stage1 (error 15: file not found)
I tred setup (hd0) ... (Error 5: Partition table invalid or corrupt)


Finally if I disable RAID in the BIOS, GRUB works perfectly and my debian gets
up without any problem.


Any help is more than appreciated.

Thank you.

Ricky

Hello everyone,
it's me again still struggling with this MB.
Finally I got that the device is a fakeraid but
searching a little bit I found out also that should be AHCI
compliant.

Abit keeps on saying there must be some conflicts with other
peripherals but I just don't understand a few things:

Why grub get stuck and cannot even load the kernel?
If it was a problem "driver-related" shouldn't I get an error
(eg. kernel panic unable to mount root) while loading the kernel?

Furthermore does anyone have a clue on why I get that weird screenshot
I attached in my last message when from the bios raid utility
try to rebuild the mirror?

Thanks a lot
Ricky