sorry i should have added more details.

my setup is

-intel q6600
-asus p5k premium
-4gb ocz 8500 reapers
-silverstone op750
-true 120

at the time my bios was stock... 204 shipped with it and i did not change any settings.

when i was "screwin around" i did go into the repair menu under vista and i scanned for memory errors i think. i wasnt able to do a system restore or anything b/c i didnt have a restore point yet. but somehow after that memory scan it booted.

the matrix manager shows that my raid array is bootable but then under that when it identifies the separate drives in the array there is a red error message on one of the disks. it just says "an error has occurred (0)" and thats pretty much it.

everything seems to be ok so far, but who knows what will happen...

and ill take a look into those links, thanks for the info.