I would make sure you are looking at the right register set in your own
code. Any code now thats going to exist for most 2.4 users will need to
do that itself, and after my 2.4 experience with the IDE core I'd advise
anyone working on it to

a) Pass it off to another maintainer as fast as possible ;)
b) Program defensively

Once Jeff has MWDMA and ATAPI in the new SATA/ATA driver he wrote then
migration might be an even better option. It'll certainly be easier to
do a lot of things right with the newest SATA code than with the current
IDE layer.