Gigabyte GA-K8n Pro BIOS issue, please help

[Muse]

It was suggested to me that I seek help in BIOS mod forums, here I am! Never dabbled in this stuff before, so please indulge a noob.

I've been having a problem. Namely, I can't get past a POST with my new Liteon DVD-RW/CD-RW SATA burner attached. I got a replacement burner and it's the same problem, the POST hangs at:

Verifying DMI pool data...

I tried a different cable, no help. Swapped the SATA HD and DVD burner positions (SATA0 and SATA1), same behavior. If I disconnect the data cable from the burner, the PC again boots to Windows XP SP3. The motherboard BIOS is the latest, F14, the only one supported by Gigabyte for my processor, AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (socket 754, FSB1600, E6, Venice, 90nm, L2-512KB).

I have the latest driver supplied by Gigabyte installed for the Silicon Image siI3512 SATA controller.

I tried restoring motherboard BIOS defaults and then clearing CMOS.

The burner works fine, evidently, if hot plugged into the fully loaded Windows XP.

My referrer suggests that the SATA controller BIOS ROM has a bug which is causing the failed POST, which makes sense to me, don't know what else could be causing this. Please suggest what I can do. Thank you!

The thread I started at Anandtech Forums General Hardware Forum where it was suggested I seek help in a BIOS mod forum:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.p...st34415756