Hi Keef
Not sure if this will be help or hindrance but here goes.
I can't remember the reason why, found only after hours of searching, but I had to replace the motherboard on one of my PCs because, despite the fact it supported SATA drives, had very similar symptoms to yours. The only way I could get the damn thing fired up was to boot from IDE. In fairness, it was probably a BIOS problem than a motherboard issue and a BIOS update might have been the answer but at the time, I was still trying to run Flight Sim on an old single core CPU so the new motherboard was a simple choice.
Regarding reporting SATA as SCSI, nothing to be concerned about. Again, can't remember the details but there is a sound technical reason why 3rd party drivers report themselves as SCSI to Windows. Something to do drive request buffering. Perfectly normal.