ESATA box doesn't work??

[Anna]

No, my boot disk is PATA, it sits on a separate JMicron IDE controller
outside of the ICH. So it is not affected by all these changes in SATA
config.
Other (data) disks are SATA.

Regards,
--pa

Well that probably explains why you're able to boot the system even though
you set the motherboard's BIOS SATA mode to AHCI rather than the default
Disabled mode. As I indicated in my last post, our experience has been that
in an XP environment (at least as it involves Intel-based systems) if the
BIOS SATA mode is set to AHCI the result is an unbootable system. Naturally
this involves situations where the boot drive is a SATA HDD.
Anna