Any updates scott? You could be holding the biggest breakthrough for this machine... :^)

Pavehawk

Burned the x86_64 DVD of FC4, put it in to look at what kernel to start playing with now, and lo-and-behold....IT SEES MY PATA DRIVES!! Now for the long process of the actual install.

Has anyone had success with FC4? On mine it sees my PATA drive spews errors on the install screen and freezes up.

FC4 installed with no problems, and is running quite happily. I'm having problems recompiling the kernel to support my nfts external drives, but the precompiled kernel finds/operates all of the hardware (all of it currently supported by linux) without any problems. I am running 2 Seagate 100GB PATA drives in ATA mode. I installed with the x86_64 DVD if it matters.

Hi there.... just read this all and I´m confused. Suse9.3 says, RAID ist Software, not Hardware, and to install Linux everything has to be destroyed. So, is there a hardware SCSI RAID Controller in my Notebook or not ??

Okay, as I use 2xSATA RAID Stripe on two partitions, each one with one WindowsXP installation, I can impossibly change anything here. I work with my notebook, no time for jokes.

I tried gentoo liveCD, but it doesn´t recognize graphics. I tried Yoper, but it shows two ATA HDs and I guess, installing means destroying everything.

So please tell me, is there ANY LiveCD you just put in drive, turn on and a fully working system starts up in some minutes ???? Or at least some system I can access my hard drives with ? With sound ? Using my NVidia ? WLAN ?

hey, can you run Red Hat Linux on the sager?

You should. Do you mean Fedora Core or RHEL? either way you will need to tweak but it will run.

If anyone else was having trouble with this, here's how I got the PATA controller to work in newer kernels where libata was modified to not check for PATA on this card.

ATA_FLAG_SLAVE_POSS is very important and apparently one of the members of the structure that was previously used to set the bit was removed. So you have to set it in the board_2037x section of pdc_port_info.

In the linux kernel source tree open drivers/scsi/sata_promise.c

Look for this section and change to the following:
/* board_2037x */
{
.sht = &pdc_ata_sht,
.host_flags = PDC_COMMON_FLAGS | ATA_FLAG_SLAVE_POSS,
.pio_mask = 0x1f, /* pio0-4 */
.mwdma_mask = 0x07, /* mwdma0-2 */
.udma_mask = 0x7f, /* udma0-6 ; FIXME */
.port_ops = &pdc_sata_ops,
},

Look for this section and change to the following:
case board_2037x:
probe_ent->n_ports = 3;
pdc_ata_setup_port(&probe_ent->port[2], base + 0x300);
break;

If you don't really need PATA, this won't work for you at all. I had my code set to test for SATA and PATA but since you have to set that flag during the pdc_port_info struct declaration anyhow, I think it will completely break SATA anyhow, but maybe not. There's probably a way to set the flag later like they used to do, but I didn't dig deep enough to make it work.

I would write a diff but I've never written one that doesn't care what else is on the lines... so regardless of what version of libata you are using, this will probably work.

If anyone needs this and it isn't working for them, let me know and I'll try to help.

-------------------
Update:
Looks like they put the port_flags back into 2.6.17-mm6 ( I didn't dig to see how far back into the mm patches that they fixed it so I'm just listing the latest ), so that is probably an option as well.

Ubuntu 5.10 worked great on the 9860 but not 6.10 and 7.04 beta. On 6.10 and 7.04 beta I could never get the sound card to work and the screen resolution is maxed a 1024 X 768. The native resolution is 1680 X 1050.

OpenSuse 10.2 worked great but could never get the sound to work. It was easy to adjust screen resolution to 1680 X 1050.

Mandrivia (it was 3 month ago and don't remember which version) was a big pain as it would not install correctly and screwed up the boot loader so bad it was easier to format my XP Partition and put recent backup in it's place. I told it to install Mandrivia on the second HDD so I'm not sure what went wrong but somehow it corrupted the first HDD. I had checked to make sure the DVD was not corrupted so I will never try Mandrivia again.

Sabayon 3.3 not sure about this one. Sabayon did not recognize the Promise Controller so just tested the Live CD option. Looked nice but no sound and the resolution was stuck at 1024 X 768.