GUIDANCE ON SATA HARD DRIVE INSTALLATION (by mingus725):
Perhaps this info will be helpful to you or anyone else with a similar SATA "drive not found" problem . . .
Just to be clear, there is no such thing as "standard" SATA. When users think of SATA, they tend to think of the hard drive (although it can be a SATA optical drive, too, of course) itself. While obviously the drive must be SATA, what is important in this situation is the SATA disk controller on the motherboard. The controller may be in the motherboard chipset, or it may be a separate device on the board. (Often if the board supports both PATA/IDE and SATA, the former is handled by the chipset and the latter by an additional device.) The way that SATA is implemented on the device differs considerably one to the next. Some devices are true SATA, others are simply a modified PATA, and there are those that fall in-between.
To install to a SATA drive, the installer must detect the controller and load the necessary driver for it. If you have ever done a clean install of Windows XP or Vista you may have encountered a similar situation, where you must provide the SATA driver on separate media - the infamous F6 floppy requirement. With openSUSE, there is an excellent chance the installation media has the needed driver, although it may not have detected it. One reason for this (and the reason why one distro may load it but another does not) is that there may be more than one driver for the device, because of changes in versions of the device or changes in the kernel or both. The kernel may not be able to determine which version of the driver is necessary. Or, it may only know of one (depending on kernel version) which may or may not be the right one.
If you encounter a "drive not found" error, restart the installation and depress the Escape key to drop the graphical interface down to text (or just use the "text" install option from the menu, but it will be more readable if you do the former). After the kernel initializes the basic hardware (cpu, ram, pci) it will look for the disk controller(s) and try to load the driver(s). You may see your problem here.
You may need to research the hardware on your system to determine the disk controller device (see below). Once you know the device (and the motherboard, if at all possible), searching the internet for the linux driver/kernel module usually turns up the name quickly, plus any issues other users have encountered.
At the installation menu, there is an F key to indicate you want to install an additional driver. The installation will route you to a point where you can select from all the drivers on the media, organized by category. Find the section for disks, find the driver module you need from the list, and select it. SuSE will then load that driver, and chances are, you're good to go.
Re finding what the disk controller is: You may find the information by searching on the make and model number of your computer. But, many manufacturers do not provide this information, or make it difficult to find. If you have Windows installed, try running msinfo32.exe. Under the System Summary, you may find the motherboard listed. And under Storage, there is a section for SCSI; this is where you may find the SATA controller. If none of this gets you the needed information, you can download and install a free hardware diagnostic program (SiSoftware Sandra is probably the most widely used, and it is perfectly safe) which will definitely give you the information.
Hope this helps. Good luck
Reference: mingus725 post:
mingus725 guidance on HD sata - openSUSE Forums