Hello world, I have successfully compiled 2.6.3 kernel with via82cxxx driver and the absolute minimum scsi the menuconfig will let me get away with (seems to need it for booting...) and I got yast to partition and format my SATA drive as hde1 and hde2. Under the 2.4 kernel, the serial sata would not work with 3 drives attached, and it would hang with the Patch-CD when I tried to load serial sata drivers. It's been a frustrating 3 weeks getting first Mandrake and then SuSE to work with an FIC k8-800t motherboard. I reported before I got nothing but a black screen for failure. I fixed that by turning on the logo and VGA support during boot, and then I read the /var/log/boot.msg file to figure out where I was going wrong with other things. I also stupidly had placed Reiserfs as a module, but changing that to built in to the kernel allowed the system to full boot. So now I've got a few minor things to fix, but it looks like I now have a fully functional AMD64 linux system ready to write code on using some nice fast sata drives. What is interesting is that the bios reports the sata connectors as being able to talk to only one drive each, but the linux driver reports looking for 2 drives on each connector. So sata-0 is ide2 and has hde and hdf, and sata-1 is ide3 with hdg and hdh. I've only got one drive, so it's hde. And it works, so I'm happy now!!! Patience, persistance, truth, Dr. mike