I recommend you try Knoppix to see what it says about your harddrive. It has excellent hardware detection, and will install on almost anything x86 compatible.
Curt- On Monday 29 March 2004 19:36, Hadar Pedhazur was heart to say: > I have an old Dell Inspiron 7000. Yesterday, I downloaded (and > burned) the ISO images for debian sid from March 27, 2004. > > I booted directly from the cd, and hit enter at the boot prompt. I > see the prompts for language, keyboard, etc., however I never see > any prompts for partitioning the hard drive. After the first few > prompts, which includes asking whether I want to do a cd integrity > check, it drops me into a shell, and says to type "exit" to > continue the installation. If I do that, it just repeats the above > process. > > Output from dmesg shows that /dev/hda is recognized as the hard > drive (which is correct). During the "hardware detect" phase > (before the cd integrity check), the only check that hangs for a > bit (about 5 seconds) is the "ide-detect" phase. lsmod shows > ide-detect (and ide-core, etc.) are all loaded, but apparently they > still didn't detect the drive. > > I googled my brains out looking for similar things, and everything > that I found seemed to say that I should run fdisk or cfdisk from > the shell prompt, and prepare the drive for linux. That would be > great, but neither of those commands is anywhere in the tree on the > ramdisk that is installed as the temporary root partition. A "find" > on the CD doesn't reveal those files there either. > > OK, so here's the really strange part. The laptop had a running > version of Xandros Desktop 2.0 running on it, so it was already a > running Debian system, with a single Linux partition on it. I > wanted to play with 2.6.4 kernel, and KDE 3.2.1. Xandros installed > perfectly on the same laptop (version 1.0 a year ago, then version > 2.0 the two separate times that I installed it). > > I then booted from a Win98 floppy. I ran FDISK and created one > large DOS partition. I then booted the debian sid cd again, and > again, it doesn't recognize the drive. > > I'm stuck for new ideas of what to try to get the installation to > proceed, and any suggestions would be very welcome! > > Thanks in advance! > > P.S. Apologies if this is a duplicate. I just subscribed to the > list today, and realized that I sent it from a different email than > the one I subscribed with :-( -- September 11th, 2001 The proudest day for gun control and central planning advocates in American history -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
