Need help geeting a SATA drive accessible

[Adam Myrow]

I have a Dell Dimension 8300, and I had a heck of a time getting SATA 
working.  What I discovered was that I needed to include SATA support from 
within the SCSI section.  For that, you have to be sure and answer yes to 
the question about including developmental and experimental features. 
Once you do that, there will be a Serial ATA section under SCSI.  You'll 
need SCSI disk support as well.  For whatever reason, SATA is implemented 
in the kernel in such a way that it looks like a SCSI device to Linux. 
So, your hard drive will become something like /dev/sda, with the 
partitions being /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc.  It's weird, but once I got it 
going, I found the performance to be incredible.  BTW, my Dell uses an 
Intel SATA controller, and I would bet that this is the case on yours as 
well.  So, go ahead and include Intel controller support under IDE as 
well, so you can access your CDROM drives, which still show up as regular 
IDE devices.