P4M800PRO-M v2.0 problem with SATA hard drive

Okay, so yeah. I went into buying this board knowing it sucked. I've read reviews elsewhere. That said, I couldn't pass up the deal at Fry's yesterday, where they were selling this board with a combo Core 2 Duo E6600 for only $199 (no rebate). Considering the E6600 usually goes for more than that $200...

Anyway, here's the deal. When I boot, the computer freezes while it's still in POST. Here's what's happened:

It auto-detects my two DVD drives, as it should, and then it auto-detects my hard drive. Here's what it says in the process:

And after this appears, the computer hangs, forcing a manual restart. I have not been able to get past this point, without removing the hard drive.

When I remove the hard drive, the computer boots normally, and can boot off of CD's and other (IDE) hard drives. However, it hangs on this SATA drive. I went into the BIOS and changed the UDMA mode to force 6, 5, and even 4, disabled S.M.A.R.T. and even forced the PIO to 4 (which the mobo detected the drive to use).

Now, I don't have any other SATA drives to test this out on, so it could very well be my hard drive, but I pulled this hard drive out of my old AMD64 machine, and it was running just perfectly at the time. And the mobo IS detecting it, which hasn't happened when HD's died on me in the past.

I've cleared CMOS a few times to try that, and it didn't work. I even took out all of the components except the bare minimum (DDR1 RAM, HD, proc). Nothing seems to work!

Do you think it's a problem with the onboard SATA? I'm planning on updating the BIOS tonight, but I need to get some floppies from work to do this. Have any of you seen something like this before?

Thanks! I noticed a lot of posts about this board, but didn't see anything specifically relating to this problem, so I created a new post. I'm new here.. ;-)

Hi,

In my case, I discovered that any USB device conected to this mobo on startup make it very, VERY slow.
I had a USB mouse conected to it and just disconecting it, boot was as fast as any other normal mobo...
Tried with other devices (pen drive) and had the same problem...

ECS sucks !