Hey,
I am starting with a fresh install off a minimal CD and everything seems to start up fine. I have to dhcpcd eth0 in order for the network to get the information from my dhcp but everything seems fine.

The problem starts right once I begin to format the hard drive. I run the command

# fdisk /dev/sda

but once I do that I get the following message:

"Can't open /dev/sda"

I go ahead and take a look in /dev and I see all my other devices such as dvd, hda and so forth but I don't see sda -which is usually what sata is listed under. I tried formating the /hda but it lists it only having one cylinder and mentions that it is running it from memory(?)

I think this problem might be related to the chipset. I have installed gentoo on a system at work and never encountered this problem. The motherboard I am using is:

motherboard: Abit AN52
chipset: Nvidia NF520 single chip

I have played around with it for a little while now, any ideas?

Try #fdisk -l
to know the name of your hd.

Rgds

I have an AN52 motherboard and the only way I could see SATA drives was to add pci=nomsi to the kernel line.
I'm pretty sure that is related to the NVIDIA chipset. On Ubuntu the kernel line can be found in the menu.lst file in /boot/grub.