First check the drive appears in the bios (if not check cables) and if you can check with something like gparted or a livecd linux distro (make it a modern one) as they are usually better than the xp install disc. If they fail to find the drives then start looking at hardware.
Also RAID and sata are not the same thing:
SATA is a type of drive interface. You may have also heard of IDE and SCSI which are two others (of many)
RAID is when you use a couple of discs to either increase speed, reliability or both by distributing data across discs.
Both are known to cause problems with windows XP install and both can be resolved by getting the appropriate drivers (you can either burn them into the install with something like nlite or when it gives you the option as the setup first runs (it will say something like press f8 to install third party drivers)).
There is another workaround for sata though, if you go into the BIOS and somewhere in the options will be what method your sata drive appears to the computer as. Make it an IDE drive here until your drivers are installed at some point during the setup and you can now change it back (there might be some speed issues so make sure to change it back).
Similar thread:
http://www.techsupportforum.com/hardware-s...os-install.html
