This seems to vary by motherboard mfgr.
My DFI mb recognizes it as just another hard drive, except there are several bios options which must be enabled for the SATA to be my boot drive.
Perhaps you are having trouble installing your OS on a system running a SATA HDD, and getting error messages which state that there is no drive detected, as I recently experienced with an Asus A7N8X-E De Luxe mainboard. I overcame the problem eventually, nevertheless, the Asus instruction manual, which comes with their board, should have clearly pointed out that the BIOS boot sequence needs to be set to Floppy - CD-ROM - SCSI, and that the SATA drivers need to be copied to a floppy and inserted after hitting F6 during the OS installation. In other words, Win XP thinks that a SATA drive is a SCSI drive, as I understand it.

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