Linux can't see my hard drive

[Harry Giles]

I have a HP Pavilion dv9000 laptop, with an AMD Turion 64 x2 processor, 
and a 100 gig hard drive.
XP shows the drive in system information as:

Manufacturer         (Standard disk drives)
Model                     HTS541010G9SA00

And it shows the controller as:

Name                  Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
Manufacturer       (Standard IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers)

The only distro I have been able to boot is a OpenSuse 10.2 live disk.  
Everything else seems to snag during the initial start up.
When I have the live version running, it can not see any hard drive.

Is this something that XP does?  Or what else can it be?


TIA

Harry G