Bug#38073: need help installing

["freefood" <freefood@gateway.net>]

Package: boot-floppies
Version: slink

This is my first time trying to install linux. I cannot get debian to
recognize my hdd. When I boot from the resc1440.bin floppy the F4 screen
says that I need to enter parameters for:

IBM PS/1 or ValuePoint (IDE Disk)      hd=<cly>,<heads>,<sectors>
IBM Thinkpad                                          floppy=thinkpad

I tried booting with no parameters and and after I chose color monitor and
qwerty keyboard it says that no hard drives were found and attempts to do a
net install. I also tried setting hd=26310,16,63 which I believe to be the
real params of my hdd. I also tried 16383,16,63 which is the max that drives
are allowed to report. I also tried these values for the hda param with no
success. (I don't understand the difference between hd and hda). I've tried
using the rescue disk from both the slink and potato dists. I realize there
is some 8GB hdd limit but I don't think that should matter.  I'm wondering
if my hdd or controller are too new for linux. Anyway, I don't know what
else to try. I did send mail to debian-users, but no helpful response.
Please help! I really want to get debian installed on my machine.

thanks,
jeff

ps. here's relevant info for my machine. let me know if you need any other
stats.

architecture: i386
model: Gateway Performance 500 (PIII-500)
memory: 128M

hdd: Western Digital Expert AC313500, EIDE, 13.5GB
drive parameters (printed on drive label): LBA 26520480
c,h,s = 26310, 16, 63 ???
hdd controller: Ultra ATA/66

I used fips to partition my hdd to leave a 2GB partition at the end for
linux.