New hard drive installation, complete nightmare

I initally bought a Hitachi 1TB drive to connect in SATA, that was
getting picked up by my BIOS, but not Vista. Vista only saw it an an
unknown device in task manager. I tried everything to get it picked up
as a drive...nothing.

Someone told me that it might be faulty, so I got another one sent out.
Now i have 2 of these drives, a total of 2TB connected onto my PC which
is running Vista Ultimate 64bit. The same problem, I even tried RAID, it
installed something upon first boot but nothing is in disk manager, my
computer or anything like that. It shows the RAID device in 'removable
hardware' but thats it, it also shows it as unknown in device manager.

I have tried to upgrade drivers and what not but it's the same, it is
DEFINITELY Vista, because I install XP and that pick up the drives
singularly.

I'm out of ideas, I heard that it might be fixed if i format and it
will pick up all drives, but I don't want to format and reinstall
everything, that will just be another headache!


--
J1mmy