In many cases, the BIOS will emulate an IDE drive for OSes that don't 
recognize the SATA controller.  THis behavior is usually selectable in the 
setup menu.  It may be that the Gentoo disk has the SATA driver, and sees 
the disk that way, while the SL disk lacks the driver and sees the BIOS 
emulation.  Generally, you get better, sometimes much better, performance 
with the SATA driver.

Steve Gaarder
System Administrator, Dept of Mathematics
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
[log in to unmask]

On Fri, 17 Oct 2008, Ken Teh wrote:

> I'm getting confused with the sda/hda naming conventions.  I thought all
> SATA disks were sd devices.  They were a while back but apparently, not
> anymore.  And, I can't seem to make any sense of when an sda is an hda.
> I'm currently installing a system with a SATA system disk that has a IDE
> CDROM.  A systemrescuecd (Gentoo based kernel) identifies the disk as an
> sda.  But the 5.2 installer says it's an hda.  There's a single IDE
> connector on the MB on which hangs a CDROM drive.  Apparently, it's not an
> hda.  What is it?  An sda?
>
> What gives?
>