SiL3112A Serial ATA & Dell Poweredge 2300

[David Witten]

I am attempting to get a Serial ATA card to work in an older Dell Poweredge
2300 server (2 x PII 400 CPU's, Adaptec 7890, Adaptec 7860 SCSI's, 2x4G SCSI
drives (on 7890),  1 SCSI CD (on 7860).  While the card has RAID
capabilities, I am only attempting to use a single drive without RAID.

The box works well enough with 4.8 & 4.9, though I have not tried to build a
multiprocessor kernel.  I am completely unable to install 5.1 from floppy or
CD boot - the kernel load always fails while probing the PCI bus or bus
bridge - at least that is always the last message on the screen when the
system hangs. Whether the SIL controller is plugged into the bus or not.

Under 4.x versions the bios reports the existence of both the SIL controller
& Hitachi 160 GB drive.  But the fdisk process completely fails to see it
(no driver, I assume)  whether or not I disable the SCSI controllers, etc.
If the 7890 is enabled I can install normally on either/both of the SCSI
drives.

1) Is the SIL 3112A supported by any version  (my searches have yielded
nothing)

2) Do 4.8 or 4.9 support ANY SATA controller/drives (my searches have
yielded nothing unambiguous)

3) Why does 5.1 so dislike this server?

Thanks,

Dave W.