Hey Bruce - thanks for checking in! I really appreciate it. I haven't had much time recently, so I haven't been able to finish up the boot loader yet - I've made a boot disk using the usbimage from the slackware cd, and while that boots it doesn't seem to have a kernel attached to it. finally got around to doing some of the steps from that wiki link last night, and I've managed to get most of the config files loaded on to the usb stick. Tonight and tomorrow I'm going to try and move the packages onto the disk and stamp it with syslinux. I should be able to test if it works or not if I can boot off the stick into the default kernel. I'll post it here once I get a working stamped image. So far I haven't hit anything that stopped me from moving on, and I think I might have found another thread with someone with a similar problem. So After this weekend I might need some more help, but I'd like to see if I can get it working.

Thanks again!

Okay, but the one thing you're missing is a kernel with support
for that ICH10 chipset South Bridge. If you don't have that, it's
not going to detect your SATA DVD drive.

I've emailed Pat asking if he Slackware-current will be getting a
newer kernel soon. If not, I'll build you a 2.6.26 kernel,and post
it somewhere on the intranut for you to download.

Sounds like you have a nice new box, and it's a shame not to have it
running a screaming Slackware install. :D

So, I finished the boot disk tonight, and trying it in my computer gave me some unexpected results. (It didn't work and spit out two pages of gibberish) I was upset, so I started poking around the bios, and I found an option to spoof the SATA as a AHCI drive - which works! It's slower to boot, and I don't think it's as good, so I'll need to update the kernel as soon as I can, but I've got a prompt at least now! Thank you so much for your help! Now time to start actually learning.

I run all my SATA disks in AHCI mode, mostly because in enables more features and it works with any SATA controller that supports AHCI.

Ok - I won't worry about it then. Keeping the drive in AHCI mode is easier anyway. I'm getting another strange problem now, although I'm not sure if it's related or not.

After using the computer for a little while the drive "dissapears". I've been trying to compile a kernel, and after a while of compiling the computer hangs for a few minuets, an error message pops up, and I'm dropped back to the console. After that, I'm unable to read anything from the drive, and any attempt to write is met with the message that it is a read only file system.
dmsg shows lots and lots of I/O errors, and smartctl changes it's output to show that theres no drive. Mount -l still claims that the drive is mounted and in RW mode though.

My first thought is that the drive is bad since it's brand new, but if that is the case why am I getting anything at all from it? I'm going to try swapping out the sata cable tonight, and see if that makes a difference. I know the most likely problem is that the drive is physically bad, but any ideas for things to try? I'm using Riserfs right now, should I reformat it to ext3? try umounting it and remounting it at boot?