Installing Sarge on Dell Inspiron 9400

[B Thomas <thomas.1037@osu.edu>]

Hi,

I would like to install Sarge on Inspiron 9400. Could you please
advice on what would be the more convienent way to go about this.

I did try installing with Kenshi Muto's custom sarge installer
( http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/ ) that uses a 2.6.15 kernel.
This way the base install went perfectly. The sata hard drive,
cd/dvd were all recognised. However after the first reboot
installation stoped at a bash prompt with the error message
stating /dev/hda1 was not detected. Could you please point me
to the docs that explain why the installer is looking for /dev/hda1
instead of /dev/sda1. Is it possible to resume installation at
this stage, so that I can get a minimal system to compile
a new kernel ?

Would it be possible to get a pure stable distribution installed
using the etch installer ?

regards
b thomas