[conspire] I get mail

[Peter Knaggs]

Rick's SATA guides helped me with a similar
problem on a Dell machine (thanks Rick)!

I wrote up my experiences here 
(search down for "SATA considerations"):
http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/LinuxHardwareInfoDellDimensionXPS

Essentially, what I found that the BIOS 
in the machine had a "legacy" setting 
that allowed the SATA hardware to run in
ICH5-like mode instead of in full-blown 
AHCI mode. The upshot of this was that 
the linux installer could see the
SATA drives, and accessed them just fine 
using the regular ata_piix driver.

> FC3's installer uses kernel 2.6.9.  

I was using 2.6.9 at the time, and changing
the BIOS setting worked, so perhaps you could
check what settings are available in your
BIOS wrt SATA, and see if any of them have
the words "ATA" in them, or "legacy" or
something like that. 

It could be a way to get FC3 installed,
and from there you could also follow 
Rick's more advanced suggestions.

Cheers,
Peter