[Techtalk] Upgrading machines with SATA drives to 2.6.8

[Mary]

Hi again folks,

For various reasons today I've been trying to upgrade a machine running
kernel 2.6.3 to 2.6.8 or 2.6.9 (the Debian builds, which are usually
quite close to the vanilla kernel).

It appears from various hazy webboard discussions that starting from
2.6.8, SATA hard drives are being treated as SCSI hard drives rather
than IDE hard drives -- ie they're becoming /dev/sd* rather than
/dev/hd*. In addition, it seems like all the driver names for the
various SATA controllers have changed.

I have a machine with a ASUS A7N8X motherboard (see earlier thread) with
a PATA (IDE) CD-RW (/dev/hdb) and a SATA hard-drive. I believe this
board has a Silicon Image SATA controller. I am completely unable to
boot this machine into 2.6.8 or 2.6.9. The drive used to be /dev/hde,
it's probably now /dev/sda or /dev/sde (I'd love to know which), but the
output of the boot process just before pivot_root only shows it
detecting /dev/hdb).

Does anyone know either:
 - which driver this SATA controller should use under 2.6.8/9;
 - how I make sure that this driver is included in the initrd; or
 - where I can find a reasonable guide to the SATA changes in 2.6.8 that
   isn't along the lines of "yeah, it worked great for me" or "you're
   using SATA? HAHAHAHA."?

Thanks,

Mary