if hes using 9front, then eriks ahci driver should support puis. there also should have been different diagnostic prints when it failed to spinup looking at ahciidentify().
so looks like jammed interrupt problem? is the cdrom also sata or is it ide? what puzzles me is that you said it booted fine from the live cd. the kernels are identical on the cd and what gets installed. you can even boot into a installed system using the livecd. did you managed to install it to the harddrive from the livecd? did you had no harddrives attached to sata when trying the livecd? maybe the bios leaves the sata drives in some unusable state (only) when booting from harddrive? really would like to see answers to these questions. -- cinap
