Thanks to S.O'Rear, R.Sanchez, P.Condon, G.L.Fairless, K.vanWyk, and Laurabelle!

Last fall (Sep. 25) I posted a message: "Newbie first-time install advice: Highpoint Rocket 133SB" (http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2004/09/msg02943.html) and received plenty of information, advice, tips, hints, and encouragement. I am sorry to say that, due to circumstances beyond my control, I was unable to install Debian during the fall or the winter. Instead of merely backing up my hard drive, I decided instead to perform a thorough inspections of it's contents -- sorting, reorganizing, deleting, renaming, and otherwise manipulating before I actually burned backup CDs. I never really understood what a "gigabyte" was until I started looking at 27 GB of files one at a time! (My first computer, a 386, had a 128 MB hard drive; my second, a 486, had a 212 MB hard drive; this machine, my third, has a 40 GB drive... and I never gave much thought to organizing myself as I created or downloaded files. Big mistake!)

I want to particularly thank those who appear in the subject line to this message. I faced a situation that I thought was unusual -- my machine can't handle LBA48, but I had bought a 160 GB drive thinking I could just attach the thing and use it. When I realized there was a problem, I bought a PCI HD controller card that would 1) support a drive > 128 GiB and 2) provide BIOS support for "legacy" OSes.

So, I picked up an inexpensive controller card: a Highpoint Rocket 133SB. After ordering it, I wondered whether Debian would recognize it when I installed (which I hoped would be in October, then November, then December, ...). So I posted a message to debian-user, making it clear that I hadn't installed yet but planned to soon, and was wondering whether anyone had any experience with this card.

Only one responder (K. van Wyk) indicated success with a similar (but not identical) card, but only after compiling a kernel with a driver-source package from Highpoint. Others encouraged me to just try a debian-installer CD, then post the results if I had problems. I only got around to it last week, 7 or 8 months later!

My installing experience was complicated by the fact that I wanted to install 5 operating systems on two drives, and I have no previous experience with Linux. I began last Friday. Due to a combination of bad luck, hardware unsupported by the debian-installer CD, and gross incompetence on my part, I had exactly ZERO operating systems booting by Sunday night. (I even torqued the WinMe partition on my old drive by accident, which I wanted to keep running so I could access email and browsers "in case something happened." I lost that partition almost immediately, thinking I was formatting a different partition.)

On Saturday I tried to install Debian, but the netinst CD failed to recognize the controller card (needing a HPT302 driver). That forced me to install, temporarily, to a partition on the old drive. The funny thing was that, once installed, Debian could recognize the HPT302 controller; that allowed me to partition the new drive and get ready to install some of the other OSes. Unfortunately, playing around with a Knoppix CD, trying to get some of the other OSes to install, I lost that original Debian install. So, by Sunday night, I had nothing working at all.

My luck improved on Monday and Tuesday: I was able to get a fresh install of WinME working, and was able to get a WinXP upgrade to install over top of a second WinME on the new drive, and I was able to get FreeDOS to install after installing Debian a second time and using 'dd' to zero out the boot sector of the FreeDOS partition.

It has been aggravating, but I've learned a lot! Being a complete Debian newb, I have a lot of reading to do over my 4 day weekend coming up! I just wanted to thank those who helped and encouraged me last fall, and apologize for not getting around to it until now. I have 3 out of 5 OSes booting from the partitions I made for them, and I have Debian running from the wrong partition. I definitely need more help and advice, but I will start specific threads for those questions. I still haven't submitted my installation "bug report," so I want to do that first. It's really strange that the installer kernel couldn't recognize my HD controller, but it installed a kernel that could!