[plug] SATA boot problem

[Jim Householder]

Hi

I have just bought a 500GB SATA Seagate Barracuda drive, and have built
a kernel on it with all the SATA options I could find built-in (not
modules).

When I boot from the drive it gets as far as trying to mount / and
panics.  A list of partitions available does not show the SATA drive,
event though the code that aborted was executed from it.

I read somewhere that the newest SATA II drives take too long to
initialise and are thus not seen.  Since code from the drive is already
being executed, that does not seem to be the problem.  If it is, a
firmware update is supposed to fix it.

Any clues?

TIA
Jim