Hey,
Hope it's not 2 late
I had many problems with sata. Also with my sata raid :P
Suse 64 bit livedvd version did not cope with my sata/sata raid.

Related to this topic.
I installed slack 10.1 with bare.i kernel 2.4.whatever . Recognized my sata disk as /dev/hdg, although it was set as first device in BIOS. Fedora 3 sees it as /dev/sda1. Never mind.

I decided to compile the latest 2.6.14 kernel. Boom, got your error. VFS hattemal fattalerror panic yadi yada.
My second attempt of compiling the kernel was a succes.
My solution was:
compile etx2 support in the kernel
compile sata support in the kernel (the dep one, wich sais libata etc..)
compile the silicon image option into the kernel (also sais somethin about sata chips S II whaever chips)
compile ext3 as a module (previously it was compiled into the kernel)

So, solution would be to compile ext2 and sata support into the kernel.

If you want i can provide my .conf file for the kernel options i used (quick mockup of options, it needs workaround for your system for sure)

P.S. i made no ramdisk

Hope this helps. 2.6.x and sata is a real pain in the ... you kno where

thank you for your reply. no its not too late. its been a while since i messed with it. i will give that a try. no initrd. what fs are you using? when this is figured out i will post what has been done here so others maybe will know and be able to post then.

My fs is ext2. IMO, the problem is not what fs are you using, but with proper sata drivers.

My filesystem is also ext2.
Related to the fs problem: did you try to install slack 10.1 on an ext3 filesystem using the default kernel?
I tried, it said unknown filesystem (the bare.i one). So the bare.i kernel only works with ext2

Also i played a bit with the 2.6.14 kernel, tried to compile it to see my sata as /dev/sda (actual sata) and not /dev/hdx (as ide).
Didn't work...
The only thing that worked was the combination i posted in the previous reply.

Cheers