You can get XPee installed instead of Vista if you hate Vista. XP does recognize SATA drives no problem. What it doesn't grok from a direct-from-install-cd boot is AHCI. You can either put AHCI drivers for your hard disk on a USB key and use F6 during bootup to use those, or go into your BIOS and turn off AHCI. Depending on your BIOS, you may have to disable Flash Cache Module. Once XP is installed, download your drivers and you can turn AHCI back on.

Same thing happened to me with a new laptop. I needed to ditch Vista because of a bad gaming fps issue with the graphics card which I later learned could have been resolved with a simple hotfix instead of an hour-long XP install.

Also, Gentoo (or Sabayon) > Ubuntu. Ubuntu's nice, but not as nice as a portage distro.