Are you sure you removed the right controller? Can you post a screenshot of the device manager with the properties of the controller you think is serving your drive?
It should have a Details tab with information about the SUPPORTED transfer mode (DMA) and the ACTUAL or CURRENT transfer mode, which i suspect is PIO.
In general, posting as much information, such as raw SMART info, will help you get more definite answers here. I'm a linux user so can't help you as much as i would like with windows specific issues, but there should be many free SMART monitoring applications for windows. If not you can always download an Ubuntu Linux cd, boot from it without installing anything, and use utilities available on the command line to test your drive.
A surface check can be done with the dd command:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=1M
This command will read from the device /dev/hda and write to the device /dev/null (nothing; so the data goes nowhere). You should change /dev/hda to the name of your harddrive, which can also be /dev/sda for example. This procedure is safe if you don't make any spelling errors in the command. So it won't destroy any data its just a read test. It won't output anything until its finished or encounters a read error.
To do a SMART poll, the following command can be used:
smartctl -a /dev/hda
This will also give you the raw SMART values i requested. After this just reboot your system and take the cd out of the drive, and you boot to Windows again.