How can I see the SATA hd in a Vostro as an IDE drive

hi there,
I was trying to enable DMA on my DVD burner when it suddenly struck me: "why am I having a SCSI hard disk and an IDE burner? Shouldn't it be the other way around?"
Letting aside the burner, I'd greatly appreciate some advice on how to have Linux (it's Kanotix, almost a pure Debian distro) see my 160 GB Seagate SATA hard disk as an IDE disk and not as a SCSI unit.

By googling around ( http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html) I discovered that the 'problem' (for some it's a solution) is that the libata driver set "causes each SATA port appear as a new SCSI bus".
I do not want to have my disk as a SCSI device because I don't want the 15 partition limit of those kind of devices.
So I am left with the other driver set: drivers/ide.

Is this a viable option?
Has anyone a Vostro and sees his/her partitions as hda#, instead of sda#?

I've read from some Gentoo site that all was needed to include the ide driver in the kernel was a

Code:

modprobe ide-disk

But Gentoo, we know, is the distro that has to be compiled piece by piece. What should I do in Debian?
I'd prefer not to reinstall everything from scratch but if necessary I am willing to do it in order to have the drive recognized as ide.

Any help?
I guess this is something that might interest many people.

EDIT: Oh my, I've just read that from kernel 2.6.19 onward the PATA and SATA disk will be managed by libata. So every ****ing disk will be seen as a scsi device with the 15 partition limit barrier. Somebody wake me up from this nightmare.

 

If you're still trying to enable DMA on your DVD drive, maybe this will help you:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/ToshibaSatelliteP200-ST2061

It's about my Toshiba system, but likely has many of the same components. Near the bottom, I posted a guide to getting everything running properly, including DMA on the DVD drive.

- Trip