Sorry to respond to such an old thread, but others have been having 
trouble with Intel ICH8 SATA Chipsets... - Art@JAX

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 DVD-RW drive has been replaced by a SATA drive because they were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?
>>     
>
> The output of lspci follows:
>
>
> 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 4 port SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)
> 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
> 00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 2 port SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)
>
>   


Serial ATA (SATA) Linux hardware/driver status report
http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=Linux+SATA+ICH8

2. Hardware support
Intel ICH "IDE" mode
Driver name: ata_piix

Summary: No TCQ/NCQ. Looks like a PATA controller, but with a few added, 
non-standard SATA port controls. Hardware does not support hotplug. 
"Warmplug" support is possible.

Update: ICH6/7/8 include support for addressing the SATA PHY registers. 
This is not yet supported in Linux, mainly because some BIOS do not fill 
in the necessary (PCI BAR) resources.

Update: Boot-time, probe-time issues continue to persist in some cases, 
related to the "PCS" register. The ata_piix driver in 2.6.18 and later 
provides a "force_pcs" module option to help users deal with this 
(values: 0=default, 1=ignore PCS, 2=honor PCS). Play around with 
'force_pcs' if you have device detection problems.


> This is more or less identical to the output of lspci on the older
> machine that froze during the install process unless you used the
> option pci=nommconf.
>
> barbu 14:52% diff osmosis-lspci shanghai-lspci 
> 25,26c25,26
> < 03:00.0 IDE interface: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 6101 (rev b1)
> < 07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82541PI Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 05)
> ---
>   
>> 03:00.0 IDE interface: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.: Unknown device 6101 (rev b1)
>> 07:01.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82541PI Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 05)
>>     
>
> (osmosis is the new one, shanghai is the old one.)
> Eva.
>
>