Can I Boot an Asus M5A97 R.2 MB from a IDE contoller card ?

This a tricky operation or some and not for others. Meaning, it just won't work, period because of h/w. All you can do is try it. that's the best i can offer if you plan to keep the IDE drives. Otherwise, move on to SATA, now. I say this because all those adapter or PCI cards aren't intended to boot from, but if they do they remain the primary drives and cut-out the SATA side. Which is why it becomes tricky. These cheaper adapter just don't always cut it and sorry the OS too becomes a PITA as it wants to work on the originally installed setup. You will need to ghost or clone over and then hope your adapter provides the needed operations to do this. Once done, you can then add the next drive and/or finish the setup. So, you need to try your current primary old drive and using one new drive plus s/w(came with it or you get at support website) -OR- use clonezila to complete this. As you see by my post, it all seems tricky and not for the fate of heart. Also, you're dealing with XP which is a painful OS to work with at times. Now, maybe a good to move on to Win7 and copy only old data over(save beforehand) and see where it goes. Win7 has it own file xfer service feature build-in.

tada -----Willy

Your better bet is to use and IDE to SATA convertor or just clone that drive to some SATA drive and see if the BIOS does the usual IDE EMULATION,. That will get it to boot and then you can do the usual OS repairs.

To clone the IDE to a SATA I would NEVER NEED any of what I wrote so far. I'd use one of those IDE to USB cables.
Bob