Asus A7N8X-E and sata

As I purchased all this clobber of Scan thought I might as well post it here first. Have an Asus A7N8X-E MB with 2 160GB Hitachi Deskstar Hds. Had for around 9mths. Set up as raid1 after a bit of huffing and puffing. Everything looked ok until a few weeks ago when occasionally on booting up (XP) would get message "incomplete raid set press F4 etc,etc" upon pressing F4 would show both drives as present. Taking the option to repair the raid set would be told not enough single drives.
I would then carry on merrily using the system, I presume using just the one drive. This message "incomplete raid set" would manifest itself say every 1 in 4 boot ups.
Then yesterday whilst using the pc a nice loud crack emanated from its rear and the system died. Opened it up fearing the worst but found no signs of the cause. So being the optimist I am switched on again, got the "incomplete" message and carried on working with it for about an hour, then switched off.
Now the trouble , trying to switch on again resulted in the "incomplete" message and pressing F4 was told unable to detect any drives. Tried each drive on its own, swapping data cables, power cables but still no luck. Finally attempted to do a repair windows, loading sata drivers off the floppy etc,etc then when asked by windows to press key R for repair windows tells me it cant find any drives either.
Am at a bit of a loss, any assistance in the right direction will be appreciated.
And just one other thing can these 2 drives at some time be run in non raid set up? cant find any reference to none raid usage, everything mentions raids.

Sorry for such a long waffle.

This seems rather a strange error you are getting. There could be several items which are causing this conflict however as it is rather intermittant I would presume its likely to be a problem either with the Serial ATA controllers and/or the Hard drives

I would advise you to contact the technical department on 0870 755 4747 option 1 and they shall try and assist you further.