AN50R SATA disks don't work

Shuttle An50R mainboard; Samsung S1614C (160Gb) SATA disks.

Attaching the disks, is fine. the RAID controller sees them fine.
I can raid or mirror or use separately.

However, when attempting to format (either from fresh Windows XP
instlal or from existing (on IDE disk) install, the install completes
to 100%, and then Windows gives an error 'unable to complete the
format operation'.

Is the motherboard duff, or is there an incompatibility with these
particular disks ?
(I've verified the disks work in another SATA computer).