newbie with large stomach requires help from informed people of all sizes:

I have a new Dell server. I bought it with no OS. I was having issues getting both knoppix and debian net install disks to read/recognise its SATA hard drive.

Both Knoppix and Debain installs would not recognise the drive.

So I bought an IDE drive and disabled the SATA (Maxtor 6Y080M0) drive in the BIOS so I could at least get an installation up and running on the IDE drive then resolve the SATA problem.

I am at this point now.

Much further information is available but I am not sure what is relevant or required to help.

If anyone can help me get this drive working I would be grateful.

big belly

make sure you are using at least a 2.24.29 version kernel, or you won't have native SATA support. Also, you may need to enable it within your kernel.

Try downloading Suse's latest boot CD and see if that recognizes it.....also not all hardware cards are supported by Linux....

Any 2.6 kernel should work.
Try mepis or kanotix to see if it recognises it...if it does,do a hard drive install and apt-get update,apt-get dist-upgrade when done.

Does your SATA controller have a raid option? I've heard that you should disable the raid option if you are not using it. This will allow debian to see the SATA drives without loading special drivers.

offtopic:
I'm little confused about this 'problem'... Why people still want to use 2.4.x kernels
They are so old stuff. Yeah I know that they are still developed but still. 2.6 are much better and faster and stable

Debian Sarge Testing is very reliable and stable and includes 2.6.x kernel :-)
With net install image you can get pretty nice system