@techdude your second question was answered in his OP. LOL
When POSTing, I can see the Kingston drive and am able to enter the RAID setting on the new SATA controller. But, I do not see a way to make the new SSD a primary boot drive. The SATA controller is not an option to select in the system BIOS and the SATA controller also displays no option to make it bootable.
as you pointed out the card may be enabled by the setting "boot from SCSI" but it may also be listed as somthing similar to "Bootable add in card" or "boot from Other"
Now that XP has assigned a drive letter for your SSD drive (& detected in Device Manager), is it now possible for XP to use this drive as a bootable system partition? (an open question to those who know far more than i)
You almost hit on another important point, when the OP partitioned the drive did he set the partition as active? This may need to be done as well.
Seems like the post contains a lot of forum appropriate detail for a spambot... this time it may actually be an honest mistake by a real person in need of advice .