I have a system with a regular ATA 250GB drive, and a SATA 250GB drive. After booting with the Knoppix CD, it sees only the ATA drive. The dmesg shows the SATA_via loading, but then shows an error message.

I work on another project G4L (Ghost for Linux), and it is a simple boot cd to allow for making hard disk images, and it includes kernel.org kernels that are just the limited amount it needs to support the g4l. With kernel 2.6.15.6, it has no problem with the SATA drive, but all the kernels from 2.6.16.x to 2.6.18.1 have the same type of failure. I've even used the .config from the 2.6.15.6 build, and used it with make oldconfig, and it still fails.

I got on to Knoppix as an option, when a user had hardware that would not work with the kernel.org kernel, but did work fine with knoppix. He had extracted the scripts required to run g4l from the knoppix, and I've since made a special file that can be downloaded and extracted on the knoppix to make it work, but know even knoppix doesn't see the drive. The system is an AMD 64 machine.

I've just started looking at the dmesg files, since the machine is my biggest server and most powerful. Hoping someone else might have gotten further alone this.