GRUB adds Windows but not other Linux distributions?

[oz]

I certainly meant no offence in my suggestion.

none taken...

[techieMoe]

In order to do an install I need a distro with the JMicron drivers. I wonder if what is happening to me could be related to having SATA hard drives. I notice something very peculiar about Linuxes describe my SATA hard drives as SCSI hard drives. Juan Pablo, do you think the problem could just be my machine?

Serial ATA drives are usually named /dev/sdx where X is usually a, b, or c. That's not a bug; they work just fine like that. I've successfully installed many Linux distributions on SATA harddrives, so it's not the drives themselves that would be an issue. However, some motherboards have obscure SATA controller chips that need special drivers. Do you know what chipset your motherboard uses? (It's usually Nforce, ATI, SiS, or Intel.)

[actaea]

My motherboard is Gigabyte 965P-S3. Its Northbridge Chipset is Intel P965 Express and the Southbridge is Intel ICH8. My knowledge of hardware at this level is very limited, and I don't understand why a JMicron driver is required for one of these chipset to recognize my cd-rom. Hell, at my level of knowledge I find ironic that it is a program on a CD telling me that the cd-rom is not recognized--but I do know the world is complicated.