It seemed both attempts failed due to the installation program couldn't find either the SATA DVD drive or the SATA hard disk. However, it's hard to believe Centos 5.1 installation couldn't recognize >these two SATA devices.
I'm now stuck. Any suggestion or advice is much appreciated.
CentOS more than likely will recognize the devices once they are on a controller it recognizes :) That model appears to use a recent Intel SATA controller (cmiiw) and is only sold with Vista. You could look at the bios and see if the Vendor enabled an option to adjust how the controller appears to the OS, look for a setting that says something like AHCI/Native/Legacy etc...
I'm sure someone here has used such a recent system and has a solution. I recall someone here or on another list suggesting some kernel parameters that might need to be passed.
jlc