installing suse 8.0 on a 7dxr+ mb. is it possible?

i'm tring to install suse 8.0 on a gigabtye 7dxr+ mb with striped drives the the onboard raid. It originally couldn't find the controller, but i resolved that with the appropriate suse support item. Then it hung at the usb stage. There was a support item for this, but it didn't work so i just disabled the usb in the bios. Now yast refuses to format the partitions. I've found a support item which refers to this, but it's less than clear. I've tried all the permutations i can but to no avail. My system is: athlon xp1800 256m ddr gigabyte 7dxr+ mb 2 x dlink network cards 2 x 60gb drives geforce 4 video any ideas gratefully received. Thanks, mike.