My computer would start booting off the hard drive, then couldn’t find the drive to continue booting after the initial boot messages displayed.
( I posted this in 2008.)
I had trouble booting the SATA drive on my 1U server. I tried a lot of CMOS settings for the drive and other hardware configs and nothing fixed it.
Finally, moving the drive to SATA channel 2 instead of 1 allowed it to boot as if it was an ATA drive. That works.