[conspire] Problem accessing SATA controller

[Mark S Bilk]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to use the Silicon Image 3112A SATA controller on my 
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, under SuSE 9.3, which is running
on a PATA drive.  My SATA drive is a Seagate ST3500641AS 500GB 
with 16MB cache, jumpered for 1.5GB transfer rate, which ASUS 
says the board will handle.

I read that this SATA controller chip requires the scsi_mod, 
libata, and sata_sil kernel modules.  After the system has 
booted up and is running KDE, I inserted modules libata and 
sata_sil using insmod, and verified their presence with lsmod.  
scsi_mod was already present.  

But cfdisk could not access /dev/sda or /dev/sdb, and Yast's 
Hardware Information function could not find the drive either.

Do disk controller modules have to be loaded during bootup to be
effective, even if they are not needed for the boot drive?

If so, I guess I have to either compile them into the kernel,
or add them to the initrd and have the loader insert them 
into the kernel at bootup, right?

Sorry for the newbie-ish question, but I have RTFM'ed, e.g.,

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

and can't find the answer.  But maybe the problem is described here:

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.add

   Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:07:07 -0700
   From: Adam Glass <adam at clarity.net>
   To: rick at linuxmafia.com
   Subject: SiI3112A update
   
   Rick,
   I'm writing re: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html.
   Sadly, the very popular Silicon Image 3112 chipset does not seem to support
   my new Seagate 750GB "7200.10" drive.  This is apparently a known issue.
   I'm still awaiting a response from Silicon Image regarding what options
   exist.
   
   Adam

  Thanks in advance,
  
  Mark