I'm having some trouble installing SL44 on a new machine from World of
Computers.  As far as WOC are aware, the only difference between this
machine and the one I was asking about in December is that the IDE
DVD-RW drive has been replaced by a SATA drive because they were
having difficulty getting a different version of Linux to communicate
with the IDE drive.

However, the installation problems are quite different.  Rather then
freezing when I boot from the boot CD without any kernel options, the
install process claims that it cannot find any hard drives.  I tried
using the all-generic-ide and pci=nommconf options - the hard drive
was then detected, but the install process hung while formatting the
root filesystem!

The relevant hardware details (copied from the quotation) are:

Motherboard + processor: Intel D965SSCK Core 2 Duo 6300 2MB cache
Hard drive: 160GB - ST3160811AS -  7200rpm Serial ATA
DVD drive: Samsung DVD RW (+/-) OEM Dual Layer/16xDVD+R,8xDVD+RW,16xRead-SATA

The Seagate website does not seem to have any hard drives with the
exact model number above but does have a ST3160812AS-RK - could this
be why the computer is behaving differently?  I was hoping they would
also have a Linux driver to download but they didn't.

Is the change in the DVD drive at all likely to be the cause of the
problem, and could someone please explain how to get the installation
working?  Sorry for all the stupid questions.
Eva.