This problem has been mentioned elsewhere but, as far as I'm aware, no solution found.

I bought a cheap Dynamode VT6421A PCI card to add capacity to an older, second computer. I didn't want to buy yet another PATA drive - hence the SATA controller card. I do not want to boot from the SATA drive - storage only.

With the SATA drive attached, startup hangs when the first WinXP Pro screen appears (the one with the moving bar) but if the drive is attached after startup, Windows sees the drive and it works fine.

The drive is a healthy, formatted Seagate 750GB (ie: within what some people say is the limit for this chip). I've used a jumper to limit it to 150MB/sec as recommended and tried all available VIA drivers, PCI slots and SATA sockets.

I'm not an engineer but this seems to be a Windows rather than a BIOS problem. Since WinXP sees the drive after booting, I feel I'm almost there.

Any ideas - apart from physically connecting the drive after startup every time?