Hey guys. This has been quite an adventure I've been on for the last week or so.
I just bought an Asus P5LD2 motherboard to build a Linux machine on (2GB RAM and a P4 3.2)
I installed CentOS 4.2 (2.6.9-22 kernel). My main HD and CDROM drive are on the ICH7 chipset.
There are two other IDE controllers on an IT8211 chipset (aka IT8211f, ITE8211).
For the life of me, I cannot get this controller working.

I just upgraded my kernel to 2.6.20.4 hoping there was native support for the IT8211 chipset but it still doesn't recognize the chipset or my drives on that controller.

This is driving me nuts.

I am admittedly pretty much a beginner at Linux hardware configuration and kernel building so I could very well be missing something really stupid but any advice or pointers in the right direction would be appreciated.

For anyone interested, or having the same problem, I finally got this resolved.
I had to do a few things.
One, I made sure in the BIOS that the IDE controller was set to "Compatible Mode" and two, when I ran "make menu" (acutally, I used xconfig instead of menu) I had to manually search for and select the IT821x driver.
Thirdly, although this is an ide drive (which should show up as /dev/hd<x>), it shows up as a scsi drive, so it's configured as /dev/sda.

This is good news thanks for posting that info.
I may very soon have a mainboard with the ITE8211 IDE controller as well, and have been wondering just exactly whether the thing is going to act like a RAID controller, or a normal IDE controller, or both or neither.
From what I've read lately, including this post of yours, it looks like the IDE connector will be usable as a normal IDE connector, though maybe as SDx rather than HDx but that's ok long as it works!