I just bought a new motherboard; an XFX MI-A78S-8209 with the Nvidia GEForce 8200 chipset. I can't get any Linux installer to find my SATA hard drive. I've tried Fedora, Suse, and Ubuntu, and all of the three report that my system is missing the hard drive. I have no idea what to do...I'm stuck using Vista. Please help!

You can run Virtual machines like crazy. You might be able to switch the mode the sata is seen in bios. Many disto's have a live cd option that can be run to see what devices are present. The try to look up either drivers or how to get that device working. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

I don't know very much about Linux. You could try Gparted to create a partition with a Linux filesystem. Theb try to install. Before posting try google. Backup. Use anti virus software.

I found the solution: First, I downloaded and installed an updated bios that supports Linux from the manufacturer's website. Good thing that existed. Second, I changed my SATA mode to AHCI in the BIOS. Then when the Linux installer started, I added "pci=nomsi" to the kernel parameters. The installer found the hard drive and everything got installed properly. However, when I went to reboot into Vista I got a BSOD. So I temporarily changed the SATA mode back to "SATA" in the BIOS and booted windows. Once there, I edited the registry as recommended by Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976 After that, I went back into the BIOS and switched my SATA mode back to AHCI again and both OS's are now installed and working properly.

Thanks for the good update. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Run the Virtual free sobware from MS and then throw LINUX on it...also, check the WWW.LINUX.COM site, saw some traffic about your situation..google it..hang in there, I share your VISTA pain....