sata_sil driver

[hayward-redhat at loup.net]

I bought three tyan thunder S2882 dual opteron server motherboards
nearly a year ago and have had no luck booting hardly any distribution
I try.  I got SuSE 8.0 working about a year ago but SATA support is
nearly non-existent.  Thought I'd try FC3 since it's been another
year, but it locks up after the kernel has loaded and it says it's
loading the sata_sil driver which is probably compiled as a module.
I'm not sure how to stop the driver from loading, but I don't think
the kernel is doing it automatically.  I'm fairly confident it's the
problem; the system locks up hard and only a hard reset will get it
going again.  I have upgraded to Tyan's most recent bios with upgrades
for the Sil3114 and tried rescue and noprobe, etc. but all of them try
loading the sata_sil driver and so lock up.  I do want to use the
Sil3114 SATA chipset, which is why I bought the machines and a bunch
of SATA drives but still no luck.

Is anyone else getting FC3 working on Tyan SATA motherboards?  The
Tyan site claims Redhat Enterprise is working on the motherboards, so
there must be significant installer boot differences between RHAT and
FC3?

- Mike