I also have the same observation.  SATA hard disks and Ethernet devices 
are not recognized even by SL 5.3 on  ASUS motherboards with nVidia 
chipsets.  An example is M3N78-EM with NVIDIA GeForce 8300 chipset.

J S Jayakumar
Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:57:01AM -0500, Salvador Aguinaga wrote:
>   
>>    Have any of you come across a system where fdisk does not recognize
>>    SATA (1.5TB drives)?
>>     
>
> Absolutely yes. For example SL kernels do not know how to access SATA
> on most recent ASUS AMD mobos using most recent NVidia chipsets. One
> example is ASUS CrosshairII, but all recent mobos with the same chipset
> have the same problem: nvidia sata and nvidia ethernet are not detected
> by the SL kernels.
>
> As solution, I run custom-built vanilla linux kernels on these machines (2.6.27).
>
>