debian installer / serial ata confusion

[Justin Speers <jaspeers@comcast.net>]

I'm attempting to install debian for the first time using
debian-installer, and I've run into some problems with my serial ata
drive setup.

I have an abit motherboard with the intel i865pe chipset, onboard serial
ata chip.  My cd drive is a Lite-on 52x burner.  My only hard drive is a
80GB maxtor serial ata drive.  I'm trying to install the 2.6 kernel,
other than that I just choose default options.

During installation, the installer fails when trying to mount the cdrom
drive.  Neither the cdrom drive nor the hard drive show up underneath
/dev.  If I disable the serial ata in the bios, the cd drive is then
detected just fine, but of course the hard drive is no longer found
since it is disabled.

It looks like Ubuntu does the same thing for me, it appears they use the
same installer.  Right now I'm running fedora core 2, and that
installation didn't have any problems. 

I've looked around google and browsed the recent archives for the
mailing list, but haven't come up with anything helpful thus far.  Any
tips / suggestions for me?  

Thanks,
~ Justin