Any luck with Alienware laptops and linux distro's?
 

Alienware? I've got an Alienware MJ-12 7700m (Mobile Workstation) which has the SATA 378 driver that is not supported by FC3 and up. Well, i've tried SuSe and FC2 and can't get anything to install. I'd heard that FC2 would install with the SATA_Promise driver contained in the kernel, but no luck with getting it to work.

Has anyone here had any luck installing any Linux on an Alienware machine? If so which distro? Thanks.

-phantasm (missing the penguin)

In the bios there might be a setting to make the sata drive to look like and ide drive. If that works that should do it. Not positve but after the install you can reset the bios back to default. The sata promise driver is in the default fc3 and fc4 kerenls. So no recompiling is required.

Brian1

I'll take a look at that Brian1, never actaully thought of that. lol.

Ok, checked the BIOS like you said. The controller is set to ATA mode. It's also listed like this in the BIOS:

PCI SCSI: SATA378 TX2Plus D0 (D0 - device reference)

Is there a choice called pata. Give that a try. I did some digging around in some stored info I have collected over the years and had this.

Use the boot option linux noprobe the you will be prompted to add device. Scroll to the Promise SX4 card and it should show your drives. It takes a while for the drivers to load for some reason but they will. Just wait!

What it means is when the first screen comes up for the install after loading the kernel type:
linux noprobe
and hit enter.

Brian1

No entry for PATA in BIOS.

ALso tried the linux noprobe option. FC3 still doesn't read any drives. FC2 crashes almost instantly when you issue the noprobe command. hm.

Just to make sure when you used the ' linux noprobe ' boot option, did it ask for additional drivers? Was the Promise SX4 there in the list? And if so did you try loading it?

If you did all the above I have no other options as far as using your current hardware option.

If it was me, I would end up installing FC* on an ide drive in the machine. Then once it is up I would have the sata drive plugged in and see if linux sees the drive. If it does then boot with Knoppix Live CD since in knows sata and using it to copy over the partitions to the sata drive. Reload grub on the sata drive and reboot with only the sata drive installed. I know this is a real pain. There is also Ghost for Linux out there in an ISO file that can be burned to CD. it supports sata as well.

Other thoughts is try other distros that support sata. I believe knoppix can be used here.

Good luck
Brian1