The 2.2 kernel is an old one: from 1999. Maybe your harddisk is too modern to be supported... I don't know the details about supported hardware and kernels, but it really sounds like a kernel problem. You could try updating to 2.4, or even 2.6. Debian woody is also quite old, there will soon be a new release (Sarge). I think you can find by which kernel your harddisk is supported. I already found an interesting site for you I think:
http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
Upgrading a kernel isn't a hard task in Debian: you don't have to recompile a kernel, you can just download a kernel-image package and install it. Maybe you bootloader(lilo or grub)-configuration will be updated too automatically, I'm not sure if woody already does that. You will not have to delete your old kernel, just choose which kernel you need on boot-time.
You can also consider moving to sarge, as it will be the next release within some months or so, but sarge doesn't provide security-updates yet, and will regularly be updated, what can result in broken packages and stuff, not a good thing for a server of course...
Succes,
Corien