I am currently experiencing a boatload of trouble with a seemingly simple proposal...using a SATA drive with my system.

I am using :

Asus A7N8x Deluxe Rev 1.04 Mobo
(NvIdia Nforce 2 Chipset)
Mobile Athlon XP Processor
1.5 gig ram
FX5900xt video card
2 ide optical drives
Antec Truepower 430 PSU
Latest BIOS, Latest Drivers. (HAve tried older drivers and BIOS as well)

In the past, I have used a single maxtor IDE drive with complete stability..I then attempted to RAID 2 identical maxtor 80 g drives in RAID 0 (IDE) using a silicon image pci ide raid controller card. The system was problematic...rebooting the computer was fine, and the system would run stable thru many reboots....however, when the system was powered down, and then cold-started again, i often got drive consistency errors. I tried replacing the drives (which both work fine on other machines) - same issues.
I replaced the RAID card with a better model some time later...same issues.
I was then advised by a friend to abandon IDE RAID altogether, he reasoned that IDE RAID was very problematic and I should simply try a single WD 10000 RPM SATA drive, which i did. My mobo supports SATA, so there is no pci interface..WIndows install went flawlessly as usual, but the SAME exact issues have crept upon me again! I can reboot the machine 100 times in a row with no problems, but when I power down and cold start, I sometimes get errors. Yesterday, I could no longer boot, so i went back to IDE. I googled the issue and came up with a few scraps of info, all very vague. One concept is that "A 3rd party program is improperly shutting down the machine" ok fine- but what does this mean and how do i fix it, and why does is affect non RAID SATA and IDE raid but not IDE alone?! Needless to say I am extrememly frustrated and do not wish to spend any more $ on drives or cards, i just want my SATA to work! HELP!
thanx

Just a quick look at the manual:

A7N8x Deluxe

1. Is the SATA jumper set correctly?

2. You're plugged into the SATA ports?

3. You installed the SATA Utilities from the Asus Disk?

What are the exact errors you get? Are they from the BIOS or XP?