Report on using DI with older MB

[Marc Singer <elf@buici.com>]

Nice installer.  Thanks for all of the good work.

I am installing Sarge (testing) to a five year-old machine.  There
have been several interesting hitches.

  o At the first reboot, just after Grub was installed, the system
    reported Grub error 18.  I figured that I forgot to do something
    so I went re-inserted the install CD to make a second go at
    installing the boot-loader.  I discovered that I could not bypass
    the partitioning phase or the install-base-system phase and just
    reinstall the boot loader.  I believe the older boot-floppies
    allowed this useful feature.

  o After I realized that Error 18 meant that the BIOS was too old to
    handle the 120GB drive as a single partition.  I began again.  It
    would be helpful to have an option to partition the drive for
    older BIOSs, with a small (e.g. 32MB) partitition at the beginning
    of the drive for /boot.  I did this by hand.

  o I wanted to use a local package mirror.  After setting the
    hostname, directory, and proxy options, the installer looped back
    to the beginning.  I suspect it encountered an error of some sort,
    but I don't know what it could be since I've used this mirror
    countless times.  Does this feature work?

  o During the download, one of the packages turned up corrupted.  The
    installer reported the name of the corrupt package and returned me
    to the top-level menu (expert26 mode).  It didn't give me a way to
    remove the file, however.  I changed to the second console to
    remove offending file from /target/var/cache/apt/archive.  Seems
    like the installer should delete the file when it finds that it is
    corrupt.  

Cheers.