SATA HDD & Mandrake 10.1

Got a AMD 64 3000+ with an ASUS mobo running on a single SATA 120 GB HDD with XP pro. got plenty of partitions to install Mandrake 10.1 but the installation wont detect my hdd and says that i need a floppy with the necessary drivers.
Q1: how can i make a linux floppy for the sata?
Q2: can i avoid the floppy creation and make any changes in the raid controller (unlikely since i got only a single hdd) or in the bios?

is there any version of linux which can detect (actually detect) a sata hdd? i believe that XP with SP2 installation cd has the drivers to detect a sata but not sure of any linux flavours.

 

Last week I installed XP SP1 on a SATA drive with no issues. I have also installed redhat ES on SATA drives with no issues.

 

I found red hat a bit too geeky. not too proficient in the kernel. i had issues loading an ntfs partition. mandrake by default is supposed to load an ntfs file system. during boot from cd, it asks for a sata floppy disk with some drivers. problem is i dont got one. an idea as how to make one?

 

I got redhat.... fedora
and you can see the SATA drive no problem, however my freakin problem is setting up the grub so that it boots windows from SATA as a primary HD or to boot from a secondary HD IDE which has linux on it. Now linux boots no problem, however windows does not and I am not familiar with the naming schemes when it comes to linux....
If I switch in bios so that it boots from my SATA drive bfore my IDE drive the windows works.

Any ideas?