Been struggling with this for about two weeks on and off.

Asus mobo, ich6r chipset, SATA. Trying to install SuSE 9.2. Using the SATA as the primary and only drive. When you go through the install process in the normal manner, suse cannot see the drive. If I go through the manual install method and install the ICH/PIIX (ata_piix, i believe) kernel module, the install takes ~30 seconds, and then says it was successful. Then I go on with the install, the drive still cannot be seen. If I go through the manual install, install ICH/PIIX (wait the 30 seconds), uninstall ICH/PIIX, reinstall ICH/PIIX (this time the wait is ~1 second) the go on with the install, the drive is found and everything is normal. But when you reboot, the boot process hangs for about 30 seconds and then you get an error that is something like:

Loading kernel /fs/reiserfs/reiserfs.ko
Waiting for device /dev/sda2 to appear: ... not found device nodes:
console fb0 fd0 loop0 loop1 ...(etc)
VFS: Cannot open root device "sda2" or unknown-block(0,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

Then the system just hangs there. If I go through the same manual install, load/unload/reload process, I can then boot off the HD or launch the rescue system, but both of these are a pain, and give minimal functionality.

I've searched the net and found a few people with similliar, but not identical problems. I've tried all (both) of their solutions. Updated mkinitrd and udev. No difference. I've also tried ext3 instead of reiser, and I've tried AHCI instead of ata_piix. I've tried the kernel that comes with SuSE, i've tried the latest kernel (2.6.11).

Since having to load/unload/reload to do the manual install method, I'm thinking that the control/drive/something, isn't waking up when its first addressed. So i'm thinking it might be some sort of hardware problem, but i'm at the end of my rope.

While i don't think its truely applicable. just for completeness of information:

/dev/sda1 /boot
/dev/sda2 /
/dev/sda3 NTFS
/dev/sda4 extended
/dev/sda5 swap
/dev/sda6 vfat

And yes, windows works just fine. I would just prefer Linux.

Any ideas, anywhere?

I was reading some of the other posts on here, and while I didn't find the answer, I found something that made me think more. Anyway, I'm posting the solution here because someone else will probably run into this.

I had to install the system using the ata_piix load/unload/reload method I describe before. Then I got into the system using the load/unload/reload w/rescue mode. Then I immediently went and recompiled the kernel. In the kernel there are two entries:

Device Drivers > SCSI Device Support > SCSI Device Support
Device Drivers > SCSI Device Support > SCSI Disk Support

These two options default (in the SuSe distro at least, which I used as a template for the new kernel) to Modules. These need to be compiled into the kernel. It even says so in the SCSI Disk Support description:

"However, do not compile this as a module if your root file system (the one containing the directory /) is located on a SCSI device."

However if you don't look at descriptions, you obviously will never see this.

This is all a bit of a surprise to me - I am running SUSE 9.2 on a ASUS AVN8X with a Maxtor SATA drive - apart from having to set the boot sequence in the BIOS when I added an EIDE drive as well - everything has alwys been totally problem free.

SATA /ICH6 seems sometimes to be really tricky.

I had the problem on an Fujitsu Siemens E8020 that it didn't recognize the HD at
all, until I found in the BIOS a switch
in Advanced/Internal Device Configuration
to disable the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface, whatever this it ,
then it did work like a charm with
SUSE 9.2 , but it took me some time to find it.

Best Regards