Bro - this exact thing happened to me and in the same process of trying everything under the sun in terms of different settings in the BIOS and in Windows (F6), I have come to the conclusion that there is some buggy driver code for SATA drives under Windows. I mean....
1. I tried loading the 32 Bit drivers in XP PRO and it installed perfectly.
Machine was flying, then I connected an IDE drive (as slave) and powered up, nothing...
I ran Seagate diagnostics, and it said that the partition was stuffed. I then ran Windows recovery and it didn't see the entire partition - only 139Gb of the 300Gb drive. This was proof that the driver either messed up the partition table or something...
So I reformatted the SATA drive, and left the IDE off.
2. Machine was flying until I installed Windows XP 64 onto a spare partition on the SATA drive, and when it came to the reboot after installation, it bombed out exactly as you say.
It seems that the driver or something is written to the boot sector that bombed out the boot process. Nothing works, the boot doesn't even get as far as offering the options to get into SAFE mode.
3. As a desperate measure I disabled SATA, put the IDE drive back into the PC and installed Windows XP 32 onto it, got it up and running 1st time (Good 'ol IDE), and from there re-inabled the SATA drive in the BIOS (but not as the boot drive), the IDE drive booted up fine and picked up the SATA drive and believe it or not everything was still on the drive - no loss of data and no corrupt partition as Seagate had mentioned. I can access all my data off the SATA drive now, just cannot for the life of me boot up on it... It still crashes the PC if I choose it as my primary boot drive...
I have been down the hardware road or checking PSU, RAM motherboard... I don't buy that, I think the SATA drivers or whatever is written to the boot sector is causing the mix up...
Any ideas will help - there seems to be many others with a similar problem if you check the net, but no one is giving any decent answers... everyone is waffling on about choosing the correct F6 drivers and power supply issues, this is not the case. The ONLY think I haven't tried, it enabling the RAID option (although I only have 1 SATA drive), and allowing it to timeout and continue the installation of Windows XP. I always disable the RAID option.
Although if I enable it now, it still dies on me at boot up (on the SATA drive).
Cheers,
Ian