Getting SATA working on Gigabyte GA07N400 Pro2 Rev 1

Quoting mstaindl

Thanks heaps winactive. Now interstate for 2 days for work so wont get to try till Sunday. Will advise success or otherwise. Again thank you.

Ok I promised feedback and here it is. A longish story, and not at the machine in question so may not be able to verify a few details - no actually the problem is so much happened and in the thick of it not all gets recorded and at my age not all gets remembered. Spoiler: it's now working!
So I was trying to add a 1.5TB Samsung SATA drive to the above board. Problem was it would lock on booting with said drive attached. Couldn't find any combination of BIOS settings to make any difference. Interestingly, I could hot plug it when the OS (Win XP SP3) was up and running, and it seemed to be able to see and use the drive - but not a satisfactory long term solution, and besides I wanted to try running Windows 7 on it.

Much searchng on the net lead to best help I found being in this group & thread. Appears I needed later Silicon Image drivers than Gigbyte had included. Silicon Image on their site strongly warn against trying to use their sample drivers directly - they advise to go to the MB makers and get the version customized for your board. Gigabyte, both from posts and from what I found on site seemed to have washed their hands of stuff so old - although even back at the time when most people had the problem they didn't seem to be any more help. They did have a later bios available for download and flashing - version 11 I'm fairly sure - which I did. It flashes via a little Flash program (Flash789??) that also comes with the download and is called from a 1 line Autoexec (also in download). I put both in root and flashed successfully. But alas, no help.

Reading above it seemed I needed to incorporate a later SI driver into the GB bios, something I was not confident in doing (or at least without blowing a couple more days of learning, and maybe my MotherBoard). Enter the kindness of people on this board, with Winactive riding to the rescue and generating the appropriate file for me (see above)(all care etc..). I downloaded it and replaced the one in root I had previously flashed and tried to do the same autoexec trick. Unfortunately it didn't work (and I still haven't traced why - could the flash program from Gigabyte have some sort of check/protection that it is in fact a valid file of theirs?)(slaapusilly at one stage I was getting told wrong bios too - might have been here). So started to research other ways to flash the MB, and realized GB also had a windows based utility to do the same thing. This worked! I could now boot with the drive attached.

I was about to post my joy at my problems being solved, but fortunately checked a little further first. It seemed now the Bios was happy with the drive, but Windows no longer was! XP would boot, even get into user logon, but then crash and reboot, seemingly as soon as it tried to look at the new drive (though can't prove that - whatever, it wouldn't stay up with the drive attached). And Win7 couldn't see the drive to install on.
Again tried bios settings, but due to advice earlier on this group focused on keeping the 'RAID' setting - possible mistake I found later.

So 1 step forward, 1 or 2 back. Back to the drawing board.
Further research showed a 'SATAaid' Java app available on the SI site. I downloaded and installed this on XP and voila, it worked! (I'm skipping quite a bit of heartache here). It installs a little blue man* in the taskbar (*technical description).

So that left Windows 7. Again SI came to the rescue. On their site was a driver listed as 'install' (as opposed to bios) - from memory about 1Mb. It had the warnings mentioned above about not using it, only using the one from you motherboard supplier. But given the success of using their code in the bios, I thought I'd try it. Windows 7, by the way, was booting to the stage of saying 'which disk, or add driver?', and couldn't see the SATA disk. I downloaded the driver from SI and put it on the IDE drive so I could navigate to it at install time, and once Windows 7 could see the '.inf' file it was happy. Well sort of - I still had to modify the Bios settings to change from 'RAID' to 'BASE', against, as I say, advice earlier in this group. (Actually, and I apologize for the unclear memory, this may have been a requirement to get the XP version going above too, in addition to the sata-aid utility).
Hope this is of use to someone else, and thanks again for the help.
My only questions are why the DOS flash program didn't work and, more importantly, what the implications are of running in bios 'BASE' mode rather than 'RAID' mode.