Driver issue: VIA 8237 SATA controller in IDE mode

Short problem: Cannot get WinXP_SP2 to boot with Via 8237 SATA
controller active.

Detail:
I seem to be having a driver problem and would appreciate any
pointers.

My home office computer is built around an EPoX 8VTAI (KT880NB,
VT8237SB). I'm booting off of a 180GB PATA hard drive and have two
250GB SATA hard drives installed. The SATA controller is set to IDE
emulation.

If I boot normally, Windows freezes during boot. (The three happy
little blue dots scroll around for a while and then freeze.) I can
boot in safe mode, and the disk management utility sees each of the
two 250GB drives as 250GB/232GiB of online unallocated space. I can
boot normally with the SATA controller disabled.

My understanding is that the preferred mode for the 8237 SATA
controller is to use it in RAID/JBOD mode rather than in the IDE
emulation mode. But if I understand correctly, I cannot switch the
8237 controller from IDE emulation to RAID (even JBOD) without wiping
the data on the drives. Unfortunately, each of these drives has some
irreplaceable material that was not backed up.

Sorry for the length, and I suspect I've left stuff out anyway. I'm
hoping this will ring a bell with someone.

.

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