After reading around the net for a while I have come to the conclusion that reaching the harddrive seems to be impossible for the simple fact that the onboard RAID controller from Silicon Image (Sil3112) is a software raid controller, whereas a hardware raid would have been more cooperative.

Eventhough the silicon image controller is detected during boot time, it is apparently not possible to communicate with it in the same way as windows xp does, seeing that the error message is informing me about the fact that the filesystem is pretty much unintelligble for linux.
Perhaps it would work if I were to start from the ground up and create the partitions installed from within linux and use linux only, but for me personally, there is no chance of that happening. I guess I just need a new (read: extra) hard drive for linux alone. Luckily this motherboard allows that.

Still, can anybody explain to me how I can change this possibly simplest of simple things: the refresh rate of my monitor?!