How to screw up your RAID 1 volume in Vista in 2 easy steps

Begin: Troubleshoot why PC won't come out of hybrid sleep/sleep mode.

Read somewhere to 'remove battery from mobo', which means to set BIOS to failsafe defaults.

Don't do this if you have a RAID and are forgetful. If you do the following steps at least remember to set your SATA drives back up as RAID otherwise it defaults back to IDE instead of the required RAID settings and borks it all up.

MSI X58-Pro
Core i7 920
6GB DDR3
Radeon 3870
RAID 1 with (2) x 320GB Seagate Barracuda hard drives (enabled RAID in BIOS before imaging disks)
(1)TB WD green SATA drive from failed My(Crappy) Book World Edition

1. reset BIOS to fail"safe" defaults to troubleshoot separate issue (PC not coming out of hybrid sleep mode)
2. forget that RAID needs to be set in BIOS for RAID to work properly and reboot

And the rest of the story...
3. Windows loaded but acted very slow.
4. Noticed Intel Matrix Storage utility wasn't loading. Remembered that RAID *needs* to be set in the BIOS for it to work properly.
5. <reboot>
6. re-enabled RAID in BIOS
7. <reboot>
8. Can't load Windows due to some missing or corrupt file. Advised to insert Vista CD and use the auto-fix utility
9. <reboot>
10. boot from Vista disk
11. Vista couldn't find my Windows installation
12. <reboot>
13. disabled 1TB drive from boot priority
14. powered off
15. pulled power from 1TB drive (only RAID drives and DVD remain)
16. boot from Vista disk
17. finally located Windows volume
18. clicked the auto-repair-thingie
19. <reboot>
20. Missing or corrupt PCIIDEX.SYS
21. *(#@@#$#$%!*&^!*(#*@#*(&! Microsoft and the goat they rode in on...
22. <reboot>
23. boot from Vista disk
24. auto-repair again
25. <reboot>
26. Missing or corrupt PCIIDEX.SYS
27. *i'm going to h311 for sure*
28. boot from Vista disk
29. auto-repair again
30. "Searching for problems...." for very long time. Time passes.
31. "Attempting repairs..." for very long time. More time passes.

It's sleepy-time now but will repost the grand finale for posterity.

Followup:

32. Vista couldn't automatically fix my issues. Blamed corrupt PCIIDEX.SYS file.
33. <reboot>
34. boot from Vista disk
35. selected command prompt
36. browsed to C:\Windows\System32\drivers and copied the following files to a ./backup directory:
acpi.sys
atapis.sys
ataport.sys
battc.sys
compbatt.sys
crcdisk.sys
msahci.sys
pciidex.sys
dwmiacpi.sys
37. replaced those files with the ones from the Vista disk (X:\Windows\System32\drivers)
38. <reboot>
39. Vista still wouldn't start, but because the boot loader was screwed up
40. <reboot>
41. boot to Vista disk again
42. selected ~please fix my Vista installation~
43. Vista actually repaired it correctly
44. <reboot.
45. Windows Vista login came up normally.

Hope this helps someone else.