I have successfully dumped my hitachi using memdump, the slax disc to force mode b, and most importantly a sil3112 sata raid card. I've read a few tut's on it, but when I came across the raisethestakes site mentioned earlier in this post; that site said under troubleshooting: "1. Incorrect SATA chipset (Must be sillicon image).". So I grabbed my cheap syba sata card from newegg plugged it in and booted slax and there it was. That article worked to a tee! I was so used to working and reading on the Toshiba drive I didn't think a silicon image chipset would work, but that was the key for me.
Now I do have nforce intel edition sata and it not 100% native, but I was able to edit mtkflash using a tut I saw in Grim187's signature near the beginning of this post. It really was pretty easy following the tut. I copied the modified mtkflash, the mtkflash.typ (or whatever that other file is) modified bin, to a bootable floppy and to make things easy, I unplugged everything sata (changed from the sil3112 to the sata on my mobo) and put the dvd drive on the first port. 5 minutes later all was golden.
Thanks to this post, I got from beginning to end using the links provided by other fine members. Thanks.