It really is a frustrating process isn't it - what seems to work for one fails for someone else - I can't begin to count the number of DVD's I have turned into coasters in the last week trying to get a system to load and I just seem to have hit lucky with the iATKOS v7 disk. You could have knocked me over with a feather when it all booted up.

To answer your first question I cannot get it to boot in IDE mode at all - has to be AHCI.