I plug in my new 250 Gig SATA drive, but Linux doesn't see it. Linux is installed on a regular IDE drive. The kernel apparently sees the SATA bus fine, it just never configures the drive.

Hardware Details:
-MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard
-SAMSUNG SpinPoint P Series SP2504C 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s

uname -a:
Linux debian 2.6.16.16 #5 PREEMPT Wed May 17 23:00:02 EDT 2006 i686 GNU/Linux

My kernel configuration:
Stupid system won't let me post a link.

Dmesg output:
Stupid system won't let me post a link to the full output.
Relevant bit:

libata version 1.20 loaded.
sata_nv 0000:00:07.0: version 0.8
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:07.0 to 64
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x9F0 ctl 0xBF2 bmdma 0xF600 irq 10
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x970 ctl 0xB72 bmdma 0xF608 irq 10
ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
scsi0 : sata_nv
ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
scsi1 : sata_nv
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:08.0 to 64
ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x9E0 ctl 0xBE2 bmdma 0xF100 irq 11
ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x960 ctl 0xB62 bmdma 0xF108 irq 11
ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
scsi2 : sata_nv
ata4: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
scsi3 : sata_nv

End result:
# fdisk /dev/sda
Unable to open /dev/sda
# fdisk /dev/sdb
Unable to open /dev/sdb


Please help.

Probably a missing module.
Show us lspci and lsmod.

I don't have access to the machine right now.

There are no modules to list. sata_nv is compiled in to the kernel this should take care of everything, no?

lspci doesn't show anything pertaining to the SATA bus or the new drive. Dmesg plainly shows that the kernel recognizes the SATA controller, it just never finds the drive.