Should the boot order show SCSI rather than HDD. Remembering that SATA drives are third party devices. Sorry to go over old ground.. but have you tried booting from a bootable floppy. Can you get to a command line? If so, can you access the hard drive from there. If you can, it's a windows startup problem. If not then it must be a driver/BIOS setup problem or the drive itself isn't commicating with the system. I have a couple of spare drives for this. Normally I'd just switch them over, see if it works. If you have the luxury of a second SATA drive, then this is a good test. If that works, then it has to be a faulty drive otherwise if it doesn't then it's the BIOS.