Stan Banash wrote:
Thanks for the info it is much appreciated. Dave please send the link, I would like to review the info. Although, my situation is not exactly the same as yours. In my case the Optiplex bios disables the IDE controller on the motherboard when a second one (the Rocket 133) is added. Therefore both my drive (20GB primary and 250GB secondary) are on the Rocket card. The latest install attempt (linux26) ran to the point where the disk are partitioned. At that point the installer reported that no hard disks were present and I could not go any further.
This is as expected, since the CD's kernel has no support for HPT302. If you wanted to follow my solution -- though it looks like Hendrik's is far preferable -- you could pull the Rocket until Debian was installed. I'm unable to find all of the links, but I did find my original description of the problem,
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/05/msg03072.html
some of the discussion about moving Debian from the old hard drive to
the new drive on the Rocket,
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/06/msg00290.html
and my suboptimal, but working, solution:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/06/msg00334.html
You can trace threads to see other posts from the bottom of these
messages.
Hope it all works out! I know the frustration you are experiencing. I'm in a precarious situation at the moment because I removed the original hard drive entirely and have two new drive on the Rocket... and if I ever had to reinstall Debian I'd be in big trouble. All I really need to do is create my own boot CD, but I haven't taken the time to do it yet. I guess I should do that this week! ;)
Dave W.