I was watching someone install Windows XP on a system with SATA drives the other day.

The PC would power up, look briefly at the CD/DVD drive, and then carry onto the hard disk.

The problem was that the SATA option in the BIOS, was set to AHCI.  To boot from a CD/DVD, you need to be in IDE Emulation mode.

Once the setting was changed to IDE emulation, Windows XP installed just fine.

Post install, you can set the BIOS SATA mode back to IDE.

Update:
Ed Bott, of Windows 7 Inside Out fame, amongst other things, was kind enough to call past.
Ed doesn’t see the issue I have.  After some Googling, I do believe it’s a Gigabyte motherboard/CD Bootloader issue.  Heck, I can duplicate the issue with Linux (Ubuntu 9.04), so I know it’s not just Windows.
Computers, you’ve got to love ’em!.

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