Second SATA drive unable to mount?

Recently, a friend of mine decided to switch from M$ to Slack, to which i was ecstatic about. However, we've encountered a few difficulties in installing it on his computer (or rather mounting his old ntfs backup partitions).

Problem: Unable to mount additional SATA hard drives beyond the first (using both kernels sata.i and test26.i)
Note: SATA drives are not in any RAID setup.

Mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb /mnt/yadda (and sdc-h) all return comments about missing block devices (ie nothing to mount)

sata.i kernel allows booting, reading and writing to main hard drive, which is SATA. test26.i (didn't want to go to the trouble of compiling 2.6.17.4 after sata.i didn't even work) provided a 'kernel panic', which i'm guessing is indicative of no support to the SATA drive (?).

Hardware:
Three SATA drives (2 seagate and 1 samsung)
MSI RC410M-L Socket T (LGA775) Motherboard atx
(Motherboard has onboard SATA controller)

The bios indicates that the SATA drives are attempting to emulate IDE drives, but mounting hd* (other than hda and hdb, which are cd and dvd drives) yields no results.

Any thing I'm missing here? Any help would great!

Update - Figured out the issue. Apparently the second two SATA controllers on the motherboard do not function with linux, although they DID function in Windows last time we checked. By moving the second SATA drive to a different controller, it was mountable easily under /dev/sdb1. I don't know if this is a chronic issue with MSI RC410M-L Socket T (LGA775) Motherboards, but might as well warn future attempts. Try switching SATA slots, the solution might be that simple.

It could be that the Slack kernel doesn't support that controller. The 2.4 kernel doesn't have good SATA support to start with, so compiling a 2.6 kernel might help you more than you think!

Slackware really isn't new hardware friendly!

hey, same problem with me also msi motherboard, just bought extra sata drive 150gb raptor, i already have one, so this is my second one, installed it, and my linux stopped booting, remove the drive and it is booting now (i also have another sata drive but not raptor) remove both drives leaving only one drive that used to work, and everything is fine ...

btw i am running custom 2.6.21 which has a native nforce sata controller support, and which is compiled into my kernel, and as i said single drive is working fine, it becomes a problem when you are starting to use multiple drives, and in fact it works if you will plug in one drive into sata1 or 2 and second drive into sata 3 or 4 but it doesnt work when you are trying to pair them.

if you will try to boot into 2.4 kernel, it is my second kernel (2.4.33.3) it will go to mbr (since lilo is loading) and after it goes through loading image, screen goes blank and computer resets itself.