SATA cards and linux distrobutions

Hi I'm trying to find a worthwhile distribution of linux so that I can free myself from the shackles of M$ however I've had a snag along the way. I have an nforce2 chipset and two SATA hard drives. The problem is no distro(redhat, suse, mandrake, xandros) I've tried supports the sata chip integrated into the system. It will boot fine without the hard drives but hangs with them installed during hardware detection. I'd really rather not have to go throught the hassle of finding a new board seeing as I will probably be upgrading my entire system in 8 months and I'd have more hardware just laying around. However an add on SATA card I could use over and over again. The problem is I don't want to buy a card only to have that also not work. Anybody have any suggestions on cards compatible with linux distributions?

Here are a couple of links. I'm looking into this myself so haven't tried it yet.
This card claims to support the Linux OS.
This link is a general Linux SATA reference.

VIA chipsets seem to work fine for SATA in Linux. Of course, that's integrated. I haven't tried an add-on card by them.

Thanks techieMoe for the nudge..
I am posting this from one of my SATA hard drives which was formally occupied by XP, but not anymore..
Although the XP OS can be installed and activated without limit(probably a necessity :lol: ) this isn't true of Norton anti-virus.

When I responded to "Berty's troll" I stated that there was no noticeable difference in speed between SUSE and XP. I just realized that I was comparing XP running on a WD Raptor 10,000RPM hard drive vs SUSE running on the older IDE hard drive. Previously, when I had XP on all my drives, there was a significant noticeable difference in performance between the SATA Raptor and the IDE drive. I think SUSE may kick some butt..

TechieMoe,
How did you get the VIA SATA Raid working?
Did you have to carry out any command line mods or prompts?
I'm a newbie, hoping to use SUSE 9.2 or Fedora Core 3, but am complete novice at anything but graphical installations.
Used SUSE 9 & 9.1 on previous dual disk PATA system, but this was not running RAID, just 2 disks, so there was no p[roblem installing SUSE.
However, from what I've read, you usually have to do some mods to the drivers in nearly all distros for nearly all SATA drive setups in RAID.
What system are you using & how did you get the RAID working?
Any help moving away from our old friend Bill would be greatly appreciated.

hope to hear from you soon,

Russ

I'm actually not familiar with setting up RAID in Linux, since my SATA drives are plugged in as normal drives. I've found this site that *might* help, though.

[quote="hengehog"]TechieMoe,
How did you get the VIA SATA Raid working?

I've had the same problems. SimplyMepis worked without a hitch. Try the free "Live" distro first. I am now playying with the hd install, trying to resolve other issues, but I think it's a very good desktop distro.

MB: ASUS P4S800D-E, SiS 180/181 RAID/SATA chips.

Dr Bill[/url]