Ok Linux Guru's, have I got one for you. I have a Sager Laptop with a FastTrack 378 SATA Hard drive in ATA mode - NO RAID. Anyway, I've had this laptop for almost a year now, and so far I've been without linux (except Ubuntu which is the only distro I've found to recognize my hard drive). I've done my homework with this drive and it seems that the only way to recognize the harddrive is to have a patched kernel to recognize this drive.

sata_promise is the module it uses in ubuntu, but obviously this comes with almost all distributions, I've tried it over and over agian with no avail, which only supports the patched kernel theory.

So here is my questions:

a.) How do I patch a kernel for an installation CD.
b.) What exactly do I need to patch the module with?


Hopefully someone here has been through this before and can help me, but so far google has no specific answer for me

PS (My knowledge of linux is above standard, I am not a linux newbie, but I am no guru.)

Heh, guess not many guru's hanging around today :\

ericbobbitt
I'm trying to install Suse 10.1, dual boot from a Promise raid 0 configuration. Windows is already installed. Suse cannot find my hard drive, I just followed instructions to install a Suse driver without luck. Fasttrack 378 is the name of my Promise Raid driver that has to be installed for windows to see the hard drive.
Carl

Carl,

In theory (I actually never ended up using Suse, I use Gentoo now - Ubuntu also picks up the hd) you will have to download the suse 10.1 iso and dissassemble it on the computer, replacing one of the files with a patched file (sorry I can't remember exactly which file at the moment - it was so long ago). and then recreating the iso.

Otherwise I don't believe there was any way to pick up the hd without it.


Ah, here is the link that showed the patch file -> http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/RAID_Controllers

YOu need to download the libata package and patch it on the boot cd. If you can take the time & have the knowledge to do so, you shouldn't have a problem after that.

Hopefully the next release of open suse will have the updated libata package on it.

Good Luck!