I cannot figure out how to get the debian boot program to recognize my hdd. I have a 13.5GB hdd, so I know there are issues with drives larger than 8GB, but I don't know how to resolve them. This is what I've done:
hard boot using rescue floppy. F4 info screen says that I need to specify params for hd and floppy hit <enter> at boot prompt to try default/auto-detect. choose color monitor it then says No hard disk drives could be found and wants me to specify network params since it thinks I'm diskless. I notice a console message that is obscured by the install windows. Some of the things I can read are ":hdd:I", "-floppy", "ide-flop". I retried this procedure using "linux hd=16383,16,63" - which I think is the upper limit that IDE drives can report. If I'm supposed to put the "real" values, then I don't know where to find them. Can't find them in the BIOS setup or on my drive label itself or at the manufacturer website. All I can determine from the specs is 16383 cyl, 16 logical heads, 6 physical heads, and 26,520,480 total sectors. I also tried this param "hda=16383,16,63". This time the boot procedure hung for a while and I could see these relevant messages: hda: no response {status = 0xff} hda: non-IDE drive, CHS=16383,16,63 hda: drive not ready for command ide0: reset timed-out, status = 0xff Then the config stuff hangs for a long time in between steps with the message "Please wait. The installation system is determining the current state of your system...". I assume it keeps trying to probe the drive. I went to the Partition a hard drive step and selected /dev/hda (only option) and I got "Fatal Error: Cannot read disk drive". Any help is much appreciated. Here's the relevant info for my system. Gateway Performance 500 Western Digital AC313500 13.5GB, EIDE Promise Ultra ATA/66 drive controller 128M ram win98 I partioned my disk using fips and left 2GB at the end for linux, which is fat32 formatted. thanks mucho! jeff