After struggling with the Intel Bad Axe 2 (D975XBX2) motherboard to get the secondary Marvell SATA controller to work with Fedore Core 7 Linux, I finally got it working. The motherboard has two on board SATA controllers, each with 4 ports, totalling 8 SATA ports. The parimary SATA controller is from Intel and it was detected flawlessly. The secondary SATA controller is a Marvell 6145 (88SE61xx), and throughout fedora core’s installation as well as boot up, fedora core tries to load the pata_marvell driver and screw everything up.

The solution is easy. Blacklist the pata_marvell. To do this add the line “blacklist pata_marvell” to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and restart the system. This should speed up the boot process if it was hanging before trying to load the pata_marvell driver.

I wrote this so anyone else who might be having the same issue can resolve it quickly. Good luck!