VAIO intel i7 Ivy Bridge ultrabook installation fail: Disks not found

Hello,

as I am newly writing to these mailing lists, forgive my formal and
content-relative mistakes.

As it stands now, I would absolutely love installing some 10-CURRENT on
my newly acquired SONY VAIO ultrabook. AFAIK powered by Ivy Bridge ULV,
1.9 - 2.3 GHz. It has an additional SATA 32 GB Samsung SSD and a
regular 500 GB HDD. It comes with Win 8, cannot stand the Metro.
(although Elan Touchscreen is nice).

I installed world from my old-beater AMD box on a USB pen drive (i386).
Now it loads the kernel, but won't let me mount any root file systems.
Looks like the platter isn't detected at all. Is that a common problem
with Ivy Bridge systems? Is it a deliberate chipset flaw by Intel as in
*this low-end lappy is not allowed to run anything else than WIN* or
can I do something about it? Forgive me for being at least a power
user, but certainly no device driver developer. :(, all has its limits.

Thank you so much. I'd jump for joy seeing this thing run BSD,
preferably even from USB, as the turbo boost and the lowish power
consumption are really cool.

Don't rip my head off for untainted e-mail origin and somesuch. I'm a
lazy bugger, my life circumstances aren't that great and most
Importantly I Dont Have A 5 Million $$ Server Farm. Cheers.