Thank you guys for the replies!

Didn't think I would get such a response so soon. I the info did help a lot, 
although I must admit some of it went over my head. Will research those things, 
example. IOAPIC.

I have a 20Gb slice that I test some FreeBSD stuff on. I think that
will go towards
testing and getting NetBSD to run. I see that you talk about DMA
support for IDE.
Does this mean that there is SATA support as well. I'm very ignorant
in this area.
But learning this type of things this year at uni :) Can someone maybe elaborate
a bit on how this works?

As soon as my test starts I'll post problems to the list. Who else
would be useful
to inform?

Thanks again for the help.

regards.