However, I would still like to know how to get the driver into the debian installer image. It seems that there should be a way for the installer to deal with this situation. Like maybe identifying hardware for which no driver is available in the install and asking the user to provide it during installation. Any thoughts?
Sorry to jump into this thread so late. I have an old Pentium III machine which needed a PCI card to allow me to use newer drives larger than 137 GB. I faced almost the same situation you are facing. Luckily, I purchased a Rocket 133SB, with an onboard BIOS which allows older OSes to use the drives through the card. Windows, for example, takes a device driver after the install is complete and allows it to use UDMA speeds instead of "legacy mode." What I found in the case of Debian was that the installer CD does not include the necessary HPT302 drivers, but it _installs_ a kernel that does! I was forced to install Debian to the older hard drive attached to the IDE controller on the motherboard first; later, I was able to manually transfer Debian over to the new, bigger, faster drive. If this information is of any help to you, I can provide you with a link to the (long) post I made to this list with detailed instructions about how I carried out these steps. I'm not using a RAID configuration, however, so if that is your intent then you'll have to figure out some further details on your own (and with the help of the good folks on this list!).
Dave W.