Cannot boot from RAID 1

[outre99]

All,
after 10 hours straight of reading forums and trying different things i'm at the end of my rope here.

After a previous HD crash i decided to setup RAID 1 to minimize downtime in the future.
I got an Abit KN9 SLI mobo with NVidia 570 SLI chipset on it, 2GB of memory, and 2 new Hitachi 160Gb Sata hard drives.

I updated Abit BIOS to the latest version (23), set up BIOS and RAID settings to create RAID 1 arrangement. When booting i see a healthy RAID status.

The boot order is as follows: USB drive, CDROM, Hard Drive. There are now separate boot options for SATA or RAID.

Then I slipstreamed NVidia drivers into a Windows XP Pro bootable installation CD using Nlite utility. The drivers work since XP install allows me to create a partition, format and copy files to it. The XP installation process goes through internationalization and network settings without any problems. However, after the first reboot i get the following error:

NTLDR is missing
Press any key to restart

Looks like the drives are invisible to the boot loader.

Any, and i mean ANY, ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[elninjo]

The boot order is as follows: USB drive, CDROM, Hard Drive. There are now separate boot options for SATA or RAID.
However, after the first reboot i get the following error:
NTLDR is missing
Press any key to restart.

Did you leave an USB stick within any USB port?
What about the BIOS option "HARD DISK BOOT PRIORITY"? Did you set the RAID device into the first position?