I know the subject of SATA disks have been discussed over and over again but I since I'm unable to the information I need here on LQ or elsewhere through googling I feel that the creation of this thread is necessary.

I have a working installation with two IDE disk (hda with mandrake 10.1 and hdb with XP) I also have a SATA disk which was not present during the installation. On this disk there are 3 ext2 partitions and one NTFS. Since Mandrake 10.1 uses 2.6 kernel that has SATA support I thought plugging it in would do the charm. I read somewhere that Mandrake uses the same stupid hd-setup as SuSE which oddly places the SATA disk as hda. But since I installed without the SATA disk in I already have a hda. Could this be the problem responsible for me being unable to see the SATA disk? This is quite annoying since I have much valued data on that disk I would like to be able to access.