Problems with Soyo P4VTE Board

[Carl Schmidt]

I am about to lose access to my laptop so I'm trying to get
DF to work on my workstation.  It's a cheapo setup with a
Soyo P4VTE motherboard and a Celeron 2.4GHz CPU.  The Serial
ATA controller is recognized, but the live CD proceeds to set
it to DMA33 because of a non-ATA66 cable it claims.  I have
a DVD/CD drive (combo) on the parallel ATA cable and am
trying to install from said device onto the serial ATA hard
drive.

Once the machine gets to recognizing the hard drive speed incorrectly
it then goes on with the following:

acd0: MODE_SENSE_BIG command timeout - resetting
ata0: resetting devices .. ata0: mask=03 ostat1=51 ostat2=00
acd0: ATAPI 14 eb
ata0-slave: ATAPI 7f 7f
ata0: mask=03 stat0=10 stat1=00
ata0: devices = 04
done

This proceeds endlessly until I reset the computer, to no avail.
I am at a loss as I no longer have my laptop to investigate with.
--
Carl