Controller and Hard drive prob. *prob solved*

Right any ideas would be appreciated:

I got me 2*160gb drives and a controller

The controller according to ze box supports drives larger than 137gb.

The problem:


Attached one new drive to spare spot on main cable to primary ide on the mobo and attached the other to the controller (which installed fine etc).

Formatted the first drive fine and when I attempted to format the next drive (the one attached through the controller) it reached 89%formatted and then cpu usage jumped to 100% and the computer slowed down. I cancelled and same thing happened again on retry.
Then just to be sure it wasn't the drive that was bjorked I hooked the unformatted drive up to the main ide cable and it formatted fine from there. Then I attached the new formatted drive to the controller and attempted a boot and it just hung at the "detecting ide devices" on boot.

I'm using winXP sp1 and the drives are recognised and work fine when connected through primary ide slot on the mobo but don't work through the controller so obviously this is at fault or it's some setting I'm missing.

Finally I have a 120gb drive (boot drive) set as master and the other 2 new drives as slave.