Can't get esata to work under XP

I have 2 P7N Diamond motherboards and am running XP Pro (32bit)/sp2.

I have never been able to get the esata ports to work. I have spent the last 4 months RMAing boards back and forth to MSI. I have tried at least 4 motherboards, 3 esata external drives, and 3 cables (all 6 feet).
Sometimes on the upper port (lower port doesn't work at all), the drives get detected in bios as gibberish. Other times it is listed correctly in post, but then I get a "9th slave hard disk error". I press F1 to resume, enter the bios, and the drive shows up. The drive never gets detected in windows, however.

In bios I have the Extra IDE/RAID Controller enabled and RAID mode is set to IDE.
In XP I have the JMP36X IDE Controller installed.
In all this time, MSI Tech Support has insisted that I am doing everything right. I called them last night and they mentioned doing an rma yet again, but when I called back today and talked to someone else, he told me that esata only works under vista in AHCI mode. He said that it won’t work under XP in IDE or AHCI mode.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer.

I am talking about the esata ports that are integrated unto the mb (MSI P7N Diamond)