OK so on your motherborad you have a ton of SATA ports. You will notice the 2 on the right are black and the rest are red. The 2 black are 3G the rest are 6g. If you want to see the drives in BIOS they need to be in the two connectors next to the 2 black ones. They will still work in the others just fine but you will not see them until you are in windows.

Make sure you have loaded all the drivers for mthe ASUS disk that came with the motherboard.

On the ram. If you only have 2 sticks make sure they are both in the black color slots.

I use Acronis. It can make you a bootable disc, and that always seems to work when windows does not.

Lets just back track a bit please.

You said this is your first build. Can we assume that your two HDD are new too?

If so then you will not see them as yet.

You will need to go into the disk management.

Here's How:

Swipe up from the Start screen and touch the All apps icon. With a mouse, right-click on the Start screen and click the All apps icon.

On the Apps screen, scroll or swipe toward the right and locate Windows System.

Click on or touch Control Panel, located under the Windows System category.

Windows 8 open Control Panel on the Desktop.

Click on or touch the System and Security link.

Note: You won't see System and Security if your Control Panel view is set to Small icons or Large icons. If you are on one of those views, just touch or click on Administrative Tools and then skip to Step 6.

In the System and Security window, click or touch the Administrative Tools heading, located at or near the bottom of the screen. You may need to scroll down to see it.

With Administrative Tools now open, double-tap or double-click on Computer Management.

With Computer Management now open, click or touch Disk Management, located on the left-hand side of the Computer Management window, under the Storage heading. If you don't see it, you may need to expand Storage by clicking or touching the |> icon next to it.

Disk Management may take several seconds to load but will eventually appear to the right.

You can now format a hard drive, change a drive's letter, or whatever other task you were planning from Windows 8's Disk Management utility.

Glad to help. Acronis is good stuff, it is easy to use, and it is more reliable than disk manager.