Originally Posted by Cornish Jack
DBTL - I don't quite follow what you are suggesting - the drive is registering in Disk Management as Drive 0 and is listed as "Dynamic, Unreadable" there is no capacity indicated but the Properties dialogue box recognises the drive as "Maxtor 6L200MO". I've tried loading the MaxBlast software to sort it out but it isn't compatible.
Some systems bring the SATA online for the traditional BIOS calls as well. This access mode may appear different from the "true" XP access mode, and the drivers of XP itself have been changed for a 48-bit compatibility since SP1. Therefore you might be able so see the same drive in different ways if you're not using the chipset/RAID specific driver.
Edit: for bootable system XP volumes the SATA driver usually has to be installed through pressing F6 at the tender moment during "the blue setup" and then -> (Specify additional Storage Device) and have your new SATA driver files at hand (where exactly, can be a bit problematic as the default is the floppy drive a: )