LiveCD (Mandriva) not recognizing SATA
 

I have been having a hard time triying to install linux on this SATA machine, I havent been able to get the live cd to recognize or mount the HD.

I just tested the Mandriva LiveCD and gave me some errors recognizing the hard drives as well as knoppix and PCLinuxOS.

Is there something I should know about SATA drives I should know about?

Check if the live cd has a list of boot options.

Sometimes F1 or F2 will give you options to choose from.

You may be able to load the needed module/s in to the kernel.

The live cd will be looking for somewhere to put a swap (temporary) file if you don't have enough ram for the whole os to load.

Disable acpi in the BIOS and try again