GUIDANCE ON SATA HARD DRIVE INSTALLATION (continued - by mingus725):
The second-to-last paragraph above needs to be clarified, and there is a very important addition that needs to be made.
The F6 option on the installation menu is very similar to how the Windows 2000/XP installation enables the user to add a SATA driver on a floppy disk, or how Vista does the same except from both floppy or CD/DVD. Except that openSUSE's method is much more flexible: Under F6 there are three choices:
Yes - takes you to a menu where you can choose from any device attached to the system that can already be recognized. That is, a floppy, an optical drive, or any partition on any disk that is already seen (which obviously, in this case, would not include the SATA drives).
File - brings up a CD/DVD box where you can supply the name of a file on a readable optical disk. This will only work for drivers which do not have to match the version of the operating system kernel which is being installed.
URL - allows you to provide a web url pointing to a set of drivers newer than what is provided with the installation. This is useful for example if you are installing with media that is months old and since it was released, a new or updated driver you need has been released. The default is
http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.0/driverupdate
In addition to the above methods, there is another way to load a driver which is not advertised but which is IMO better than any of the above, because it does not require the user to have obtained and put the driver on media, etc. Furthermore, this method may even enable the user to find the driver without knowing in advance specifically which one is required. Here is how it works:
Re-start the installation normally. At the first screen (the License Acceptance) click on Abort. You will be taken to another "an error occurred during the installation" screen, click OK, and you will be taken to the main menu of "linuxrc", which is a shell which wraps the kernel inside the installation. On that menu is a selection "Kernel Modules (Hardware Drivers)", choose that to go to a list of sub-menus. The first choice "IDE/RAID/SCSI" is for disk controllers (SATA is in the SCSI class). Select that and you will be presented with an extensive list of driver module names
and the accompanying manufacturer/model number.
So for example, if your SATA drive is on a Silicon Image device on your motherboard which was not automatically detected, you will see it here. The same is true if your drive in on a SiS combined RAID/SATA, or it is on an add-on Promise PCI SATA card. Because the make/model is also often listed, you may be able to identify the driver even if you don't know its specific name. In a few cases (via, for example) it can be difficult to know which one to choose; select one and try it, if it doesn't work, repeat the process selecting another.
Important final note: There are other linuxrc sub-menus besides the one for disk controllers, which you may need to use. There is one for USB and another for Firewire; many external devices connected to these ports use a proprietary interface, you will find those drivers here. Or you may need one of these if installing to USB key or smart card storage. There are also additional drivers for PCMCIA cards and Network devices/cards. Finally, there is a selection to "Show Loaded Modules" which will display all the drivers which have been detected, useful for narrowing down what may need to be additionally loaded, or, in the very unusual occasion when one driver conflicts with another, here you can remove the driver that was automatically detected and replace it with one which you select.
All in all, driver selection is a very powerful feature of openSUSE.
Reference: mingus725 post: HD sata - openSUSE Forums