Does RH 8.0 support SATA hard drives. I am running a 3.0Ghz w/a 9800 Radeon

Nope, its not really the drive mind you, but the serial ATA controller. The Silicon Images controller was added, reliably, in 2.4.21 of which Redhat ships 2.4.20 with RH 9.0, 8.0 being 2.4.18 based (2.4.20 after that first up2date to get rid of the ptrace buged 2.4.18), is just too old. It depends on your SATA controller. There's some support for the Intel ICH5 controller, but its a bit hard to hack in just now. Most importantly, what controller do you have?

Cheers,

Finegan

thanks,
the controller is an on-board controller on a ASUS mb P4C-800

thanks,
the controller is an on-board controller on a ASUS mb P4C-800

Its an ICH5

This is a beast to add in support for. Its doable, heck I did it a few months ago, but its not exactly simple.

The current -ac tree of 2.4.x has ich5 native support in it. This means if you want to install to the SATA drive, patching a 2.4.22 source tree with the -ac4 patch, compiling that, after configuring in everything else you need, then making an RH boot disk, then replacing the boot disk's kernel with yours, and then installing using the kernel boot disk to cd method....

or..

You can go into your BIOS and switch the SATA controller to act in "legacy ATA mode" which is rather slow, which will show the kernel just a normal old ATA channel, and install normally. Then you can go and get the new source and patch and build a new kernel, etc...

or...

You can install to a normal ATA drive, compile the new kernel on there the same as above, boot into that, blah blah blah, and then just copy the whole filesystem onto the SATA drive.

Method 2 is the easiest, if the BIOS supports it, which I remember it doing. Still, if you've never compiled a kernel before, this is a bit of a shock.

Cheers,

Finegan