i notice one bit in this thread that doesn't reflect how things really work. drives get labled C or D if they are blind probed at the usual i/o port locations; otherwise if they are discovered via pci space (even if at the standard port locations) they are labled starting with E. ahci drives also start with E, as they are similar in spirit to ide drives listed in pci space.
it used to be that the labs iso would not boot from ahci because the cdrom would never show up as sdD0, for obvious reasons. it also wouldn't work on the amd motherboard i got as early as 2006 because the ide-interfaced sata was listed in pci space, and therefore showed up as sdE0 or some such. i don't know if this is still true of the labs kernel. - erik
