Ok history so far..
Installed latest 2135 kernel and although on boot it noticed and assigned a scsi device to my Maxtor 80 gig SATA drive (via southbridge 8237 controller) it was not visible from the O/S. So anything todo with sda/sda1 was invalid.
Since this is the closest I ever got to getting SATA support I played around and found an older Fedora kernel (2129) which somebody had very kindly patched in the libata code. Same versions as the latest Fedora core (0.81) and this worked <Cheer>.
However since the output for both boots was identical I had a further play and managed to get the current fedora kernel (2135) working.
Initially I had it down to a problem with some of the kernel modules I'd had loaded (currently I have NVIDIA,VMware and ati_remote loaded) but with a little more playing I came to the conclusion that it probably wasn't anything specific with the modules themselves but a timing issue?.
So now I have a system where my SATA drive appears to the O/S most of the time. Can normally get it visible within 2/3 reboots from cold. Normally first time on a warm start..
Better than no support at all but still a tad annoying..
Regards Simon
