I've seen weird things like this on some of the new boxes Dell is
selling. I was able to get around it by turning off RAID in the
BIOS. For some reason, it seems they don't behave well with one drive
and RAID enabled. Anyway, it's a shot in the dark, but you might give
it a try.
On May
I'm trying to set up a Mythbuntu system with a single SATA hdd, but after
installing and rebooting it gets stuck at "GRUB Loading stage1.5."
It works when I install Mythbuntu and GRUB onto a parallel ATA hdd, but as soon
as I enable SATA in the BIOS with the SATA drive connected it hangs at 1.5.