Without knowing where it stops and if it complains about something its imposible to diagnose whats the problem, just by knowing its asking you to reboot.
SATA AHCI should be straightforward in any Intel chipset, if you still get troubles try selecting the bare minimum options in the installer as advised by the OP, usually the only thing really required to boot maybe would be some ATI kext (I'm not familiar with ATI so I'm not sure there), PS/2 kexts if you need them for mouse&keyboard and nothing else.