Let me first say I have quite a few questions/problems regarding both cd and floppy boot using netinst RC3.
Floppy boot:
Considering I have been using floppies the vast majority of the time in my journeys: I will first start with them.
When booting from floppies and loading cd-drivers.img I am able to
make use of the partitioner and it detects my WD800JD harddrive and,
apparently, Koutech PSA150 SATA Controller. I have just recently
bought both these pieces of hardware and the Koutech (I/OFlex) says it
supports Linux so I'm assuming it will work fine with Debian (although,
looking on the drivers cd I only see drivers for Mandrake, Redhat and
UnitedLinux). However, it seems to detect the controller just
fine as far as I know.
When it comes to partitioning I can either auto-config or manually
partition. When I auto-config it only sets up / and /swap, which
is fine, however, I want to make extra partitions (eg: /boot, /var,
/home, /usr, etc). When manually partitioning I'm able to see
options for other partitions but am not sure how to make use of
them. Should I pre-partition using a Windows tool like
PartitionMagic8?
In addition: I am going to dedicate my whole 80GB harddrive to
Linux alone (the 30GB Quantum Fireball hd only has Windows on
it). Do I make the 80GB hd a Primary or Logical partition?
This is the first time I've ever had access to harddrives and,
therefore, am not quite sure what to do. I plan on changing the
bios boot parameters to reflect which hd I want to boot from (Debian,
Windows). However, will LILO/GRUB be able to recognize both hd's
and allow me to boot accordingly. If I edit lilo.conf to specify
which hd is dedicated to which os, it should, correct? This would
eliminate my use of the bios.
Also, how do I download the packages from a specified Debian
mirror (HTTP, FTP... whichever). I don't use proxies so I've been
informed I leave the text field empty. DHCP isn't able to detect
my eth0 device automatically. I manually configured it using IP
198.168.0.1.
However, I don't really need to configure my network since my computer
isn't going to be networked. However, I'm assuming this helps in
downloading the packages. The only way I'd be able to download
the packages is by configuring my Motrola cable modem. Therefore,
I plugged the LAN cable into the network card and tried to have
debian-installer detect it. It's supposedly compatible with
Linux.
I think this concludes my questions/problems for floppy boot (don't worry, the cd boot is much shorter).
CD boot:
When I directly boot from the netinst cd it commences hardware
detection and freezes at 5% while trying to detect sata-sil. At
one point during floppy-based installation I received the error: "Error
while running 'modprobe -v sata-sil"? Now, is sata-sil the
controller or the harddrive? I'm thinking it is
the controller but am not
absolutely positive. I've been reading (or rather, skimming) the
Installation Guide
recently
but have not found many answers to my questions. I've let the
installer try to detect it for 5-10 minutes with no results.
Regarding the problems I'm having with the SATA drive... I have found the following information:
SATA driver can block access to CD drive in installations from CD.
On systems having a SATA IDE controller that also has the CD drive
connected to it, you may see the installer hanging during hardware
detection for the CD drive or failing to read the CD just afterwards. A
possible reason is that the SATA driver (ata_piix and maybe others) is
blocking access to the CD drive.
You can try to work around this by booting the installer in expert
mode and, in the "Detect and mount CD-ROM" step, selecting only the
drivers needed for CD support. These are (ide-)generic, ide-cd and
isofs.
The drivers needed to access the disk will still be loaded, but at
a later stage. By loading the CD drivers before the SATA driver in this
way, you may be able to complete the installation. Note that CD-ROM
access may still be an issue after rebooting into the installed
system. >>
http://www.nl.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/errata
This should do the trick. I will have to give this a try.
See if you can change your SATA settings in the BIOS from
something like "Native mode" to "Compatibility mode" (might be labeled
differently)
However, the first option seems to be the resolution to my problem.
I take back what I said about the CD boot section of this email
being shorter: I always find interesting information (previously
unknown) as I type.
Sorry for the enormity of this message.
Thanks