The only other suggestion is to make the "rescue" and "root"bf2.4 Woody boot floppies and boot from them. Once you get to the start of the install, then you can use the CDs (if they are good) for the install of the base system or go straight to the netinstall.I don't have a floppy drive.Unfortunately this isn't a option.I did create the reiser partitions with a 2.4.20 kernel but as you said- partitions don't even get mounted where I get stuck. Just to make sure I didn't screw up something with the ISO I burned a gentoo install CD and that boots just fine and finds all the hardware. Real strange!Are you using the "Boot from CDROM" option in the BIOS, or are you booting from some other method to start the boot process? Care to share your boot proceedures? Maybe there is something there. I have a couple of machines here that just won't boot from the BIOS, and I have to use floppies to get it started, then switch to the CDROMs when asked. What sort of machine is this?? I should have asked that earlier... I am only familiar with i386 and some Dec Alpha methods to get Debian running...I do use the cdrom as the first boot option and it normally works fine. I did d/l burn and try the gentoo CD just to make sure that I don't screw up something with the burning or the boot process and it worked fine.Did install mandrake yesterday and that went w/o any trouble either.It's a i386 with a sis chipset - nothing special. Strange things are that: old potato cd boots fine testing cd boots fine had the same error a while back with Knoppix I'll probably try something like throwing the archives on a prtition and chroot over there.Never tried that with debian though. BTW - just for the archive: There is a module for sis900 on the 'testing cd'. Problem is that when you choose netinstall at boot it doesn't get loaded - now that makes sense.Doesn't it? If you do default install and load all the modules a couple of times it will be there but the installer won't be able to load it with modprobe. You need to open a console and do insmod sis900.Thats as far as I got. Dhcp configuration didn't work for me. Klaus