I've run into a somewhat similar bug with herd-5. I was able to boot the livecd and install with only an IDE attached, but when I hooked up a secondary SATA drive, the Live CD would panic during boot and the already installed system would have various IRQ-related problems, boot up very slowly, and fail to recognize both the SATA drive and the network card.
Using the irqpoll option had no effect. The fix for me was to turn *on* RAID in the BIOS. No idea why that fixed it, but all the problems disappeared. product: Dimension XPS Gen 2 vendor: Dell Computer Corporation BIOS: version: A02 (10/20/2003) capabilities: pci pnp apm upgrade shadowing escd cdboot bootselect edd int13floppytoshiba int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer acpi usb agp ls120boot biosbootspecification netboot *-storage description: RAID bus controller product: 82801ER (ICH5R) SATA Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.2 bus info: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:1f.2 logical name: scsi0 logical name: scsi1 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: storage bus_master emulated scsi-host configuration: driver=ata_piix latency=0 resources: ioport:fe00-fe07 ioport:fe10-fe13 ioport:fe20-fe27 iopor t:fe30-fe33 ioport:fea0-feaf irq:18 *-disk description: SCSI Disk product: Maxtor 6Y160M0 vendor: ATA physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: YAR5 serial: Y48ZFXGE size: 152GB capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 -- Sata disk not identified during install (Ati sb600) https://launchpad.net/bugs/75055 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs