I used the "noapic" boot option to get Mandriva installed on my Via-based system because it would hang during install where the sata controller drivers were being loaded. I have two sata hard drives I use for storage, with Linux on a pata drive.This is what I did after an upgrade to 2006 rc1 caused me to lose the sata drives:
After making the appropriate entries in /etc/fstab:
...and creating the mount points:
mkdir /mnt/data1
mkdir /mnt/data2
I got my sata drives recognised by adding this:
/etc/init.d/harddrake restart
mknod /dev/sda1 b 8 1
mknod /dev/sdb1 b 16 1
mount -t reiserfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/data1
mount -t reiserfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/data2
These two sata drives were recognized, configured and running fine after installing 2005le. When I upgraded to 2006 rc1, I had to do the above.
When I did a clean install of the Christmas Club release, it all worked out of the box.
On my AMD64 system, my only hard drive is a sata 40GB Seagate. It's an nforce3-based board and I had no problems with it. 2006 x86-64 worked out of the box, as well.
HTH
lynchmob