hello:
I haver mandrake installed on an ide hard drive which is labelled /dev/hda

I added serial ata device. It does nto show up in mandrake drake tool or qtparted.

But when I use suse installation disk it clearly shows up as /dev/sda.

Is ther any way I can make mandrake detect the drive?

thanx

Assuming you have mdk 10.1 or later, you should be picking up your sata drive. Anything earlier, and your likely to have problems. If that's not an issue, I suspect that since you installed the drive after your initial mdk install, the sata drive is not showing up because you are not loading the sata drivers, unless you have some unusual sata controller.
The easiest potential fix is to boot of your mdk install CD-1 and select an "upgrade" install. Don't select any new packages, just let the upgrade install go. The only thing you are doing here is detecting your new sata drive and leting the install program configure the modules for the drive. It usually goes pretty fast.

I did try to do an upgrade install from madriva 2006 rc2 disk. It went through the motions. But still does not show the new serial ata drive

What was your original mandrake installation version; I assume it wasn't 2006.

it is 2996 rc2. In the list of hardware items it shows support for serial ata raid controoller/
for hard drives it shows only hda the ide drive

The rc2 indicates it is a release candidate, i.e. it's beta software. The final version of mandriva 2006 will be released for public download at the end of October. It might just be beta weirdness; wait for the official release.