Debian Install CD doesn't recognize my hard drive

[Hadar Pedhazur <hadar@unorthodox.com>]

I have an old Dell Inspiron 7000. Yesterday, I downloaded (and burned)
the ISO images for debian sid from March 27, 2004.

I booted directly from the cd, and hit enter at the boot prompt. I see
the prompts for language, keyboard, etc., however I never see any
prompts for partitioning the hard drive. After the first few prompts,
which includes asking whether I want to do a cd integrity check, it
drops me into a shell, and says to type "exit" to continue the
installation. If I do that, it just repeats the above process.

Output from dmesg shows that /dev/hda is recognized as the hard drive
(which is correct). During the "hardware detect" phase (before the cd
integrity check), the only check that hangs for a bit (about 5
seconds) is the "ide-detect" phase. lsmod shows ide-detect (and
ide-core, etc.) are all loaded, but apparently they still didn't
detect the drive.

I googled my brains out looking for similar things, and everything
that I found seemed to say that I should run fdisk or cfdisk from the
shell prompt, and prepare the drive for linux. That would be great,
but neither of those commands is anywhere in the tree on the ramdisk
that is installed as the temporary root partition. A "find" on the CD
doesn't reveal those files there either.

OK, so here's the really strange part. The laptop had a running
version of Xandros Desktop 2.0 running on it, so it was already a
running Debian system, with a single Linux partition on it. I wanted
to play with 2.6.4 kernel, and KDE 3.2.1. Xandros installed perfectly
on the same laptop (version 1.0 a year ago, then version 2.0 the two
separate times that I installed it).

I then booted from a Win98 floppy. I ran FDISK and created one large
DOS partition. I then booted the debian sid cd again, and again, it
doesn't recognize the drive.

I'm stuck for new ideas of what to try to get the installation to
proceed, and any suggestions would be very welcome!

Thanks in advance!

P.S. Apologies if this is a duplicate. I just subscribed to the list 
today, and realized that I sent it from a different email than the one 
I subscribed with :-(