HD Install :: Installing on SATA disk

Debian Etch is kernel 2.6 so not very useful to compare.
I could be wrong but I believe 2,4 kernel saw sata drives as sd and not hd. If you can boot from a cdrom and then see what DSL sees as your hard drive, DSL being a 2,4 kernel is not able to use all the various SATA drives. Before doing any install I would try to boot a DSL cdrom with the sata boot option to see if this hardware is supported and if so what drive letter was assigned.

Interesting. I have been booting DSL from a USB stick and trying the hdinstall from there. As mentioned by Roberts, I tried booting from cdrom. (It has to be a usb device as these eops machines have no internal cd). The boot freezes during autoconfiguring devices. I tried to boot the cd in my home PC (it has internal CD and SATA drive). It just said it couldn't find the Knoppix system. Burned another DSL CD and it did the same. I'm puzzled, but don't have any more time to spend on this at the moment. I will come back to it and report any 'progress'.

Where is my head? Correction to last posting... My home PC uses an external USB CD/DVD drive. Is there any significance?

USB devices are slow, they often haven't been recognized yet when the KNOPPIX scan is done.
Try adding "waitusb" to your desktop machine boot arguments.

You can always avoid the search for knoppix issues by using the initrd version of DSL.

Next Page...
original here.