Eva Myers wrote:
> 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 DVD-RW drive has been replaced by a SATA drive because they were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.
>
It is not the hard drive which is the problem, it is your SATA controller.
By any chance can you try to boot if from a (recent!) Knoppix live CD,
and run 'lspci' for us?