Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe problems booting from SATA

Hey folks,

I've been working on this one for a while and am getting nowhere.

My desktop has been running fine for ages. I decided to set up a
server using a really old PC I had kicking around. To do this I
bought a couple new SATA drives and a FastTrak TX2300 PCI raid
controller by Promise. I was having a hard time getting the card to
work on my server with Ubuntu and I'd read around that some folks
upgraded the firmware on the card and were able to get it to work. To
do this I put it in my desktop PC (the one that is now broken) as it
runs XP and the tools for the firmware update are readily available
for XP. So after all this back story here's what happened.

- I put the FastTrak TC2300 PCI raid controller by Promise into a free
PCI slot on my desktop PC (A7N8X-E deluxe motherboard).
- After turning on the PC my monitor would not leave low power mode
and my PC didn't make any post beeps.
- I took the raid controller out and still nothing.
- Then I swapped out the video card for an old one lying around and
was occasionally able to get part way through the boot process.
- Then I swapped my good video card and nothing worked.
- I then tried to boot with the old video card and an old IDE drive
that I used to use in the same machine. I was able to boot the
windows install on the IDE drive (configured as primary master).
- I then put my good video card back in and tried to boot from the IDE
drive ... it works.
- Then putting the SATA drive back in a disconnecting the IDE drive I
can finally get to the part in the boot process where it should load
from HD0 (after CDROM and floppy). Then I get the error 'A disk read
error occured ... Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart'.

During the boot process, just after it prompts for a <ctrl+s> or F4
for raid setup it detects my drive and displays the model number. At
this point I'm sure the motherboard can see the drive. I can't help
but notice that I seem to have a lot of IRQ conflicts: USB1.0/1.1 OHCI
Controller, Multimedia Device and RAID Controller (I'm not sure if
this is on-board or the TX2300) are all on IRQ 11. I noticed in the
BIOS I had it set to automatically assign IRQs for plug and play
devices. I suspect what happened is that the PCI raid controller's
presence caused the PC to shuffle around some IRQs and now I have
conflicts that are killing me. I have tried turning off the auto
assign and even marking IRQ 11 as reserved so that everyone gets
kicked off to no avail.

Does this sound reasonable? If so, how do I fix it? If not, any
ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Steve