ASUS A8V MOBO and SATA problem?

Has anyone experienced their SATA ports not working?

I am using an ASUS A8V Deluxe board. It has 2 sets of 2 SATA ports. 2 Ports are for the Promise controller, the other 2 for a VIA controller.

I have 3 SATA HDs connected to the ports, 2 are in the Promise ports but not set up as a RAID, and 1 in the VIA port. At first the VIA port gave me an error during POST, then eventually the 2 Promise ports gave me an error during POST. I have re-installed the drivers in Win XP, but still no good. I look at the device manager, and the drivers are running. When I look at BIOS, they are enabled and in IDE mode. Could my ports actually be not working, or do you think that the connection is just too loose?

 

I would say it's running in the wrong mode, if you have sata, it should show your hard drives in sata mode - can you change this in your bios ?
The IDE, unless you have IDE hard drives , as well, should show as the line your cd/dvd rom is/are on.