National Semiconductor PC87393VJG

From LinuxLaptopWiki

1 Status
2 How to check if this is your card
3 Notes (partially Sager 9860 / Clevo D900T specific)
4 List of Laptops using this Hardware

[edit] Status

Working.

[edit] How to check if this is your card

[edit] Notes (partially Sager 9860 / Clevo D900T specific)

TODO: add more / fix this page. Anyone is welcome to change this..

PATA and SATA are working with Hoary Hedgedog and should work with any recent distrib (upcoming Fedora Core 4 and others).

To use Fedora Core 3 on a Sager 9860, you must buy SATA drives, and set the BIOS to "SATA" mode (as opposed to RAID) mode. FC3 should install without problem then. Some re-sellers of the Sager 9860 only offer the PATA drives (such as Alienware on their 7700m OEM). In this case, you will not be able to install Fedora Core 3, and should choose another distribution (or another reseller that offers SATA drives).

If you have already bought the laptop with PATA drives, and you want to use some distribution not mentioned above, all is not lost; however, you will most likely have to build your own kernel. There is a patch for the Promise SATA controller to allow linux to recognize PATA drives connected to it, which is the situation in a 98x0 with PATA drives. The only place that I was able to get it working was the mm1 patch for 2.6.13-rc4. Download 2.6.13-rc4 and the mm1 patch (links below), then apply the patch ("patch -p 1 < mm1-patchfile" or something like that.). If it applied cleanly (it should), go in and configure your kernel as usual. For the disks you will need to enable SCSI support, and under low level scsi drivers, choose "Serial ATA (SATA) support" and then "Promise SATA TX2/TX4 support". This should build a kernel that can see your PATA drives. I've seen reports that the patch in question is available for 2.6.11, but I was never able to get it to work. Once you get a kernel working, you should be able to feed it to the debian installer or whatever other distro you feel like sticking in.

2.6.13-rc4: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/linux-2.6.13-rc4.tar.bz2

-mm1: http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.13-rc4/2.6.13-rc4-mm1/2.6.13-rc4-mm1.bz2

Gentoo handbook has a section on getting Bios (Onboard) raid going that worked for me:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_Install_on_Bios_%28Onboard%29_RAID