How to install to Sata Drive with Promise Tx4 installer? etch or lenny

[Mitchell Laks <mlaks@post.harvard.edu>]

Hi,

I have been trying the last 2 days to   install etch or lenny onto a  sata drive 
that resides on  a Promise Sata Tx4 4 channel controller.

However the etch or even the  latest lenny nightly build
 network-installer do not recognize the sata drive.

In the past  I have installed debian on PATA IDE drives for system and used
sata drives  only for storage.

I am using a  seagate 750G sata drive,
and both the debian 4.0r5 etch installer
and also the latest nightly build of the lenny installer from
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ : neither
recognize my hard drive, they only see some other drives on the system, in this case the 
an old adaptec ata raid 2400a.

I checked, and the BIOS certainly recognizes the drive, and the bios from both 
the Promise Tx4 andAdaptec 2400a post on the  screen. I have set the system to boot from
the cdrom then from the seagate drive on the Promise Tx4 pci card.

I want to avoid having to install first on a pata drive and then  mirror the install to the
sata drive.

I know that the SATA TX4 is debian compatible ( I use it on about 10 machines for data storage).
I think that the debian-installer does not have the proper kernel module sata_promise (???).

I like the TX4 controller card, it is very versatile and  relatively cheap.

Is there a way to load  kernel modules for the Tx4 (ie ata_generic and sata_promise)
into the running kernel of the installer, so it will recognize this hard drive? 

I have posted this a  few days ago  to the debian-boot list, but perhaps because there is more traffic on debian-user 
sorry for the cross post. ON the    other hand, I feel  more at home on debian user list...

Thanks,

Mitchell Laks