erm.. your filesystem? as i don't think mepis relys at all on hard drives.. though i have never tried it without one, but i've tried knoppix without harddrive and it works fine.. and i don't see why it wouldn't support SATA either.. try some other live cd?
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lisp hacker
running: FreeBSD 5.4 - still learning
develop with: SBCL + emacs for lisp, Anjuta IDE +gcc for c, SPE for python..
browse with: opera