Gear Info:
   Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra
   Maxtor SATA DiamondMax Plus 9 (160Gb)
   Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro
   Soundblaster Live 5.1
   Lite-On DVD-RW 8x

I bought the SATA drive a while ago and installed it as the only SATA drive along side 2 ATA hard drives and a DVD writer.  I had already had WinXP Pro SP1 installed on the ATA drive and the SATA drive worked fine as extra space.

I eventually needed to re-install Windows and so set-up my SATA as the boot drive and installed WinXP Pro fine with the drivers from the Silicon Image website.  Now that WinXP Pro has finished installing, Device Manager shows the drive as being "The drivers for this device are not installed. Code 28" Location - PCI Slot 9 (PCI bus 0, device 8, function 0).

I have installed all the latest drivers for my mainboard/chipset, display adapter, sound card, etc... but if I try to install the drivers for that SATA drive or try to install Norton AntiVirus 2004 it makes my PC freeze halfway through booting.  

My PC seems to struggle every now and then because of the SATA drive not being installed properly...I've searched everywhere...please help...thanks! (*phew*)  

What type of SATA controller are you using?  The motherboard you cited in your post does not have built in SATA.

Sorry, I missed the "Ultra" part of it.  I use the  Gigabyte 7VAXP in the system I am currently using, so I just saw that part of the model name.  I guess I wasn't paying attention.

I'm assuming that you used the F6 option during the installation to specify the SATA drivers.  Have you used the SATA drivers that came with the motherboard rather than those from the SI site?  There may be a slight difference in the Gigabyte drivers and the SI drivers that could be the root of the problem.

Also, I notice now in your first post that you said the 'drive' shows it's not installed correctly.  Does the controller show up fine?

If you used the driver from the Giga-byte site then you should be fine.  It should the the same, or more recent, as the driver on your CD.  The only reason I mentioned that was because some motherboard manufacturers will have the chipset tweaked a little when adding it to their boards.  Gigabyte doesn't usually do this, but you never know.

You may want to use a program like Sisoft Sandra to ensure that the item listed in device manager is actually your SATA controller and not the Promise.

No probs on the Ultra part - call it equal because I led you down the garden path when I said it was the drive that was not working... to be precise it is the Mass Storage Controller that is not currently working properly.  In Device Manager under the Disk Drives section, both my ATA and the troublesome SATA seem to be fine.

In regards to the F6 option when installing XP from clean, I tried the drivers from the Gigabyte site (a couple of times), and then with the SI site out of desperation.  I don't think I tried the actuall driver on the CD I got with the mainboard.

Another note - when I go to the Windows Update site it shows an update to the storage device.  If I let Windows install that driver... I get the same freezing while Windows boots up.  The description of the Windows Update is:

Silicon Image, Inc. - Storage
Silicon Image storage software update released on January 21 2004.

If re-installing with the original mainboard driver is the only option then it will have to be done but I have everything installed just the way I like it!

Please point it out if I am on the wrong track, but the mainboard has a built-in Silicon Image sil3112A controller.

The mainboard link is:
http://tw.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-7VAXP%20Ultra.htm