>>I'M NEWBEE<< I ve read 'thousands' of posts about installing mandrake linux 9.2 onto a system with sata but i can't still find the solution to my problem...
I have a pentium 2.6 with gigabyte motherboard and a hard drive sata maxtor 80GB connected to her. When installing windows in order to ''see'' the sata drive you had to press something for additional third party applicati... bla bla bla... and install through a floppy the additional drivers. In linux mandrake 9.2 i begin the setup with the boot disk and then i don't know what exactly to do... In one hand when i press F1 for more options it let me insert a floppy which supposes contains the drivers. The problem here is that i dont know which drivers it need[i read lot of stuff about promise, via and more but i dont know what to do with them or which one of all i need] and also it needs the floppy formatted for linux. On the other hand if i just press enter and continue installation after the first questions about mouse specs and language it asks me about disk/scsi interface smth. I tried to install with the most of them but it always brings up errors about failure and more and asks me some more things but the point is that whatever i do it always bring me back[to screen with choosing disk/scsi interface. I have one more pc at home with an IDE hard disk and mandrake is running just NICELY there, the problem is definetely with SATA.. What should i do? I still can't find a solution about it.. PLEASE HELP!!

I'm pretty new too.
I may having the same problem. When installing Fedora, Suse and Mandrake it says that it can't find any hard drives. From what I have gathered it looks like the kernel doesn't fully support sata. I have read some posts that you need 2.4.22 and higher. I have a VIA 8237 sata controller running a AMD64. I have just downloaded Mandrake 9.2 for the AMD64. I haven't finished let but it looks like it is going to work. By the way I have the SUSE LIVE cd and it works just fine. Just my 2 cents.

Maybe u should try the new Mandrake 10 Beta 2. It includes the new kernal and KDE 3.2. If it would work anywhere it would prally be there. I would do some research though before I downloaded another ISO.... Hope this helps

enx guyz..!!