Have you tried going into the BIOS setup and changing the SATA interface from AHCI mode to IDE mode?
If you can't do that or it doesn't help, I suppose the next step would be to look at the output from
lspci. If there's nothing there that's identified as "SATA controller" or an unidentified device, you'll need to post the full output. There will be more there than you'll want to copy by hand, so save it on a USB flash drive and carry it to the machine you're using for posting. Plug in a USB flash drive with a partition that's formatted with FAT32 or VFAT, then
Code:
mkdir /mnt/tmp
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/tmp
lspci >/mnt/tmp/lspci.txt
umount /mnt/tmp
I'm guessing that the USB drive will show up as "sda" since no disk drives are yer being found. If not, you'll have to adjust that accordingly. Post the content of that file here.