ahci issues

[Tom London]

I had similar problems with an install on a Thinkpad X41 with the same chip.

I worked around this by booting the install with 'noprobe', and
manually selecting the sata_piix driver along with the appropriate
network driver (tg3 in my case).

This 'worked'.  I only had to fix the video controller settings (from
vesa->i810) after the system was installed and running.

Hope this helps.....
   tom