AIC 7870 scsi freezes slink install

[Patrick <patrick@kirks.net>]

Hi all.

Setting up a proxy server for a small company who had Red Hat
installed and had locked themselves out.

Being a Debian fan, I set about redoing the whole thing using slink.

Install freezes at the point where the partitions are being assigned
on the hard disk.  I never get beyond the installer doing mkswap
/dev/sda2 as it locks at that point.

Repartitioning the disk causes a freeze at the point where the fdisk
is writing the new partition table.

I tried using Tom's Repair Disk to partition the disk.  No problems
at all.  In fact, SuSE 5.2 which s over 2 years old installed
flawlessly.

Is this a known problem?  Id there a special rescue disk for scsi
installations? Debian is MUCH easier to support than SuSE for me so
if there's a way to install slink before returning the box tomorrow
I'd be grateful.

Thanks in advance,

Patrick Kirk