Issues with SiS 962 Southbridge & sis5513 IDE drivers

[Philip Prindeville]

I'm trying to install FC3 on an AMD NX1750S Geode board which
has the SiS 741CX + 963 (or 962) NB/SB chipset.

I couldn't get any of the drivers to recognize the IDE controller in
"native" mode, so I put them into Legacy mode and managed to
install...

I then went back and put the controller into "Native" mode, but
when I reboot the system panics because it can't find any logical
volumes to mount...  which I suspect is because the kernel sis5513
driver doesn't recognize the chipset.

Are there any known issues with the sis5513 drivers?  And will
the disk have been written differently in Legacy mode versus
Native mode?  Or should it still be consistent either way in the
case that I do manage to get the sis5513 drivers to recognize the
controller...

Because if they don't, then I'd have to reinstall from scratch and
it might not be worth the trouble.

Is there any advantage to using the controllers in Native mode over
Legacy mode?

Thanks,

-Philip