Have any of you come across a system where fdisk does not recognize SATA (1.5TB drives)?

The system is a dell Optiplex GX280, BIOS ver A08, I have toggled both SATA configuraitons on the BIOS, but I still have the live CD come, up but completely unable to recognize the hard drives when I type "fdisk -l" I have tried the same with fedora 9, and with netBSD, and netBSD returns erros reading wd0 (as it tries the installation process).