Thanks ahead of time for even reading this! I know other people have posted similar if not the same problems, but I've gotten so frustrated with this I'm starting my own thread lol

So here goes...
I was installing SUSE 9.3 and everything seemed to be going OK - I got through the first CD and it automatically did it's first boot. When restarting it did this:

blah.. loading a bunch of crap
blah.. loading some more crap
blah.. kernel
blah.. sdsomething
blah some other stuff
(so far so good)

...and then...

Waiting for device /dev/hdb2 to appear:........ not found -- exiting to /bin/sh.
sh: can't access tty; job control turned off.
$


From what I could gather over the last couple days from threads and things, I beleive the problem is that my hard drive is not being recognised because it is a SATA drive.

Here are my specs:
-Brand new Dell XPS Gen4
-Windows XP Media Center SP2 as current operating system
-3.4 ghz
-4 GB ram (although i think it only sees 3 GB for some reason)
-ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum (not that this matters, but nice huh?)

Hard drives:
-WDC WD740GD-75FLA1 (74 GB, 10000 RPM, SATA)
-HDS724040KLSA80 (400 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA)
-SAMSUNG SP1604N USB Device (160 GB, 7200 RPM, Ultra-ATA/133) - this is the one I want to install linux on... it is an external USB hard drive, which might be part of the problem?


This might be useful too:

IDE Controllers:
IDE Controller Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 266F
IDE Controller Intel(R) 82801FR SATA AHCI Controller

SCSI/RADI Controllers:
SCSI/RAID Controller A347SCSI SCSI Controller
SCSI/RAID Controller D347PRT SCSI Controller


So far I tried every ATA, PATA, SATA, or whatever those settings are in BIOS.. I also made sure I had the latest drivers and I looked into kernels but from what I could understand I didn't need to change that


With all of that said... any help would be grately appreciated. This is my first time using linux cause I wanted to try it out, so please give a detailed solution if you have any ideas

I couldn't get RAID to work in SUSE 9.3, but the SATA drives were recognised as individual SCSI drives, as in sda, sdb etc. I turned off raid support and everything else in BIOS, it seemed help. I never did get a stable file system wroking so I moved on to other distros.

so basically i can't use suse? I also tried mandrake and ran into the same problem - seemed like it had trouble finding the drive :/ ... Im sure i could try others but im just getting discouraged

anybody else have suggestions?

I see that you try to install Suse9.3 to an USB drive.
Try to install on one of the harddrive's that is SATA.

I more or less have it now thanks... that external hard drive WAS part of the problem

now if only i could make suse display correctly lol - but thats for a different thread