Hello,
Not sure if anyone will get to read this, but I would like to thank Elrin, Melanierw, and Dark Mantis for the helpful posts. This particular post caught my eye because the system specs are almost the same(different video card). I replied to this post since there did not seem to be other posts like this one after doing a search. Also, to confirm that there is a problem with the SATA vs. GSATA ports.
I too had the issue about Windows 7 hanging on the startup screen. The solution was also to switch the SATA connection from SATA2_0 to GSATA2_7.
This problem occurs for all of the SATA2 ports(0-5).
I have now spent a total of 8 solid hours trying to figure it out, all the while believing it to be the classpnp.sys problem that other Win7 users have run into.
The annoying part about this problem is, as Elrin stated, when you switch the hard drive out (put in another computer/ put a working hard drive into this computer) it works in the SATA ports! Something about this motherboard REQUIRES the user to have hard drives which had their operating systems installed on this motherboard to be connected to the GSATA ports.
Edit: I tried installing Win7 32-bit.