Drives will not format...

["Brian Rademacher" <rad radfiles net>]

System is an Abit SU-2S, dual Opteron 246, 2 gigs ECC, 2 Maxtor 300 gig 
SATA-II drives, Marvell 88SX-6081 SATA II controller...

I can get each drive to format on it's own and install, but when both are 
connected, formatting in software RAID 0, or even leaving it as the default 
"automatic" partitions results in:

Writing inode tables 980/4454 (then it stops)

Warning, had trouble writing out superblocks...Anaconda dies shortly 
thereafter saying that it can't continue...

Then the drives go off line, and "Rejecting I/O to offline device" shows up 
in dmesg...

I've taken out RAM, passed every kernel parameter I can think of before the 
install, wiped out the HDs with DD, etc...