Quick tech question here.  I recently had to do a clean install of Windows XP.  In the process, though, setup wasn't recognizing my hard drive and was being forced to cancel.  Turns out my copy of Windows didn't have the drivers necessary to recognize the hard drive as a SATA. (And my PC no longer has a floppy drive so that I could boot the disc from there.)  Managed to get around that by changing the hard drive from "AHCI" to "ATA" in BIOS.  The setup went fine after that, and the drive was formatted successfully.

My question is, is it safe to change the drive back to AHCI after all this?  Or would doing so corrupt the drive?  It's to my understanding that a SATA running in ATA (and IDE) has less performance capability than it would when it's running in its native AHCI.

Yes it will be a problem.  You need to install the AHCI drivers before turning that BIOS option back on or you will BSOD into Windows every time.

Gotcha.  Thanks for the reply!