" wrote:

I am not sure exactly what you mean by emulate, but the important
thing is that the BIOS detects the drive.

Obviously you are not aware that SATA controllers that are built into
motherboards and secondary controller cards require their own 32-bit
driver for windows, and that for compatability reasons most of them have
bios options to appear as generic IDE drives so that Windows (NT-based
windows that is) will have the correct drivers to access them during
installation.

NT-based OS's do not use the bios int13 routines to access the hard
drive.

Win-9x will use the bios routines when it doesn't have the proper
drivers for the controller in question - this is known as
"dos-compatibility-mode drive access, or 16-bit drive access".