Seagate 80GB SATA drive works fine for me even without selecting different kernel at boot. It maps as /dev/sda, not /dev/hda. I have a very new motherboard however (VIA K8T800 based ABIT KV, so I can even boot from SATA (in fact this is my only hard drive). If your harddrive is new, probably all you need is to create some partitions on it ("cfdisk /dev/sda" or whatever).

Cannot help with adding drivers, sorry.