It might help if you posted your exact error message ...
Most of the time a kernel panic is because the root filesystem is
not built into the kernel, but a module; and therefore requires an
initial ramdisk image to load that module.
To find out what sata module you need, just issue "lspci" and see
what chipset your motherboard uses. The particular SATA drive is
of no consequence ... it's the controller chipset. This is mine:
Code:
mingdao@silas:~$ /sbin/lspci | grep -i sata
00:0f.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA RAID Controller (rev 80)