I am currently building a new 64 bit AMD Sempron computer. I bought a Western Digital SATA drive, and am trying to load Suse 9.3 on it. I've seen the thread where it was suggested turning off Raid. I did that and it didn't work. I turned off Raid and set SATA to IDE, to no avail as well. I also typed sata.i at the boot prompt when first loading the first CD, and that didn't work either. Are there any other tricks that I have missed that may be helpful? I apologize in advance for asking a question that seems to have been asked many times, but I am hoping someone may have a new approach on getting around it.

I have one IDE and one Seagate SATA drive. I installed SUSE, Slackware, Ubuntu and Debian on my IDE drive. SUSE and Ubuntu automatically detected my SATA drive but Slack and Debian needed some help(sata.i and linux26 respectively). Although I didn't install on my SATA, I'm sure it would have been possible since it detected it. This leads me to believe your drive isn't even connected properly. I've put in three SATA drives now and they've all given me problems. Most of the time it was my BIOS settings. When you boot up, do you see a screen that lists your SATA drive? First the computer must recognize that it's connected, then you can worry about SUSE installing on it.

There are a things that could be wrong in the BIOS. I'll go through a few if that's in fact the problem.

I am sure that the drive is connected properly, it is only two cables - the power and the sata cable both of which only can go one way. I try and load the system, hit the delete key to get to the bios settings and see that SATA is enabled and RAID is enabled. I've tried every combination of disabling/enabling them, but yet when installing SUSE when it gets to the hard drive detection it doesn't find anything. I have a backup 40 gig non SATA drive that is recognized without a problem when I install it.

The connections are probably fine. What model is your motherboard? The best thing to do is ask others who have a similar setup. You gotta find out exactly where the problem lies. My advice is, download the drivers for your hard drive from Western Digital's website. Throw in an XP cd, boot it up, press F6 to load the hdd drivers. If it detects your hard drive, you'll see a screen that shows your hard drive(Don't be alarmed if you see it smaller than what it is). If it doesn't detect your hard drive then it will say it. I had the same problem with the WD SATA drive I setup. Once I fixed the BIOS settings, Windows picked it up fine.

I know you've been over the BIOS settings a hundred times, but I'm still sure that's the problem.

What S-ATA controller does your board use? Maybe you need to load the driver manually.

The problem is, where would you put the driver? We haven't been able to get to the point to build a file system to even load a driver. Perhaps I am unclear on the process of installation but it seems like the HD would have to be recognized to put a driver on it, unless you are referring to a way to load it using XP, then putting Linux on it? For anyone browsing this forum, it is a Biostar K8T80-A7, and the HD is a Western Digital WD800 JD 80 Gig 7200 RPM SATA.

Sometimes the driver is already present, but not loaded because of false hardware recognition. If you enter the 'Manual Installation' mode, you can load all drivers yourself. You could also use 'insmod=<driver>' from the grub menu. If the driver is not available on the installation CD, you may find this interesting:
http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/ft...ia-HOWTO/html/

Thank you, I'm going to try that tonight and tomorrow and get back on the forum if it fails. Thanks again.

Do you happen to know the name of the driver that we would be looking for?

No, that's why I asked for the S-ATA controller. But after googleing your mainboard, I found it is using a VIA chipset. Try to load the sata-via driver.