Rehat, SuSE, Knoppix, and mini-Knoppix all FAIL for me.

The only one that boots my system is SUSE 9.1 and Dariks Boot & Nuke ...

I dont understand why a simple linux bootdisk can see my drives but an entire distribution is unable to detect... it makes no sense to me...

I wish I had time to make a custom kernel to boot my motherboard... but that reeks of too much time to be spent...
Ok, I finally discovered the problem. I have a MSI motherboard and I connected the UltraATA hard drives using a normal IDE cable to the ATA channel. Evidently that caused KNOPPIX to not see the hard drives. I used a UltraATA cable and then attached the two drives to the ATA channel (MSI K7T266 pro2-ru ) and it works great now!