DSL-N :: detecting SATA with dsl-n

I have a new laptop that barely works with dsl (have to disable most hardware detection to boot -- crashes on shutdown regardless), but works very well with dsl-n. Unfortunately, however, my SATA hard drive is not detected. Apparently there is a SATA cheatcode for dsl, but this did not seem to work with dsl-n. Is there another way to get SATA to work?

original here.