Changing Harddrives whilst PC includes a RAID Array

I've got a Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI motherboard.

It has two RAID controller chips, of which I use one to controller a RAID 1
array of two Seagate ST3160827AS SATA 7200.8 160GB drives.

The O/S is Win XP SP2.

All was working fine, even after adding my old IDE harddrive from my old PC
(continuing with the boot disk being the RAID 1 array).

However, I wanted to wipe my old IDE drive to allow it to be used for
backups... Before wiping it, I decided to make it the boot drive to bring
my old install of XP up to allow me to run the transfer wizards to ensure I
had all the settings and data I might need from the old HDD. (The old
install of windows complained about hardware, given the install had occurred
on my old PC, as expected. I was still able to run Transfer Wizard
succesfully).

The problem arose when I switched in BIOS to make the RAID array the boot
disk. On boot, just before Windows XP shows it's logo, it would blue
screen. The blue screen would flash by before I could read it and the
system rebooted automaticaly. This occurred continuously. This was stopped
by uncabling the old IDE drive, which allowed Win XP to start, but then I
kept getting dirty bits on two of the partitions of the RAID drives (which
after many repetative checkdisks, finally stopped).

All seems to be working well again; but I've lost faith in being able to
recong drives at will. I have re-configed drives in my PC for many years
and never had this problem; although this is the first time I've done it
whilst having a RAID array.


I still want to be able to attach another HDD (with the RAID array remaing
the boot drive) to allow backups of my significant volume of data (too much
for DVD burn even - 50Gb), but am now wary of changing my config. I now
know I can change Windows System option to not reboot automatically on
crashing; to allow me to see the blue screen details, but am wary of cabling
the IDE drive back in to further troubleshoot in case I lose all my data.

- Why would changing the boot sequence and booting from an old windows
install affect the RAID parition integrity and reverting the setup back?
- Before cabling the IDE HDD back in, should I perform some action or add it
with specific considerations?
- Should I uncable the two SATA drives in the array, cable the IDE drive in
and then run a harddisk test from a bootable CD?

Thanks in advance,
D.