sata under linux

Hello,
I have main board Assus P4C800 Deluxe with two sata slots. I was looking for a way to make them work with my linux (RedHat 9) and regarding the info I found I downoladed the 2.4.22 kenel and I applyed the patch-2.4.22-ac4 patch to it. Compiling the so pached kernel I hound the SATA options under "SCSI support->SCSI low level drivers" section where I checked SATA support, Intel PIIX/ICH and VIA SATA. This kernel does detects the sata disks but detects them as SCISI. Later I am able to partition the disks with fdisk and it detects at least the disk's size corectly (122G).
The PROBLEM is that when I try to make a new file system on my partitions somthing goes wrong and mkfs.ext3 on /dev/sda1(partition wich includes the entire disk) crates me a file system of 1.4G instead of 122G for example.

Thanks for any help
Vlady

from dmesg:
................
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xEFE0 ctl 0xEFAE bmdma 0xEF60 irq 5
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xEFA0 ctl 0xEFAA bmdma 0xEF68 irq 5
...............
scsi0 : ata_piix
scsi1 : ata_piix
Vendor: ATA Model: Maxtor 6Y120M0 Rev: 0.71
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
Vendor: ATA Model: Maxtor 6Y120M0 Rev: 0.71
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
................
SCSI device sda: 240121728 512-byte hdwr sectors (122942 MB)
sda: sda1
SCSI device sdb: 240121728 512-byte hdwr sectors (122942 MB)
sdb: sdb1
..............

What happens if you run "mkfs.ext3 100000000" (hundred millions, 8 zeroes)?

Executing:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 100000000
I get :
mke2fs 1.32 (09-Nov-2002)
mkfs.ext3: Filesystem larger than apparent filesystem size.

I guess there has to be something wrong with the driver that you are using. It seems to be returning the wrong number of blocks on the partition. Would you be as kind as to post the output from "fdisk -l /dev/sda"?

By the way, what chipset does this card use?