[Sussex] Sarge and IDE troubles

[Ronan Chilvers]

Hi folks

Something strange happened to me last week when doing a sarge install.
I wanted to play around with building a very minimal sarge system to use as
a firewall.  Initially the hardware I was using was a desktop machine
based on a Gigabyte 440BX motherboard.  This particular board has an IDE
problem on the primary IDE channel so I was not too surprised when the
sarge installer couldn't find any drives (even though there was a drive
on the secondary channel).  Thinking I was dealing with dodgy hardware I
tried the install from floppies on a little Toshiba Portege CT320 laptop
This laptop has been running for ages with IPcop on it so I swapped out 
the drive and put in a 6GB empty drive to stick sarge on.  Fired up the
floppy installer (intending to do a network install) and it couldn't
find the drive.  Thinking the drive might be duff, I stuck it into a USB
caddy and it was quite happily found and opened up by my Dapper laptop.
I then stuck the drive back in the toshiba and tried a set of debian
woody floppies.  They found the drive!!!!!  Tried the sarge floppies
again and guess what... no drive found.

In the end I installed a minimal woody installation across the network,
then fired up the ADSL connection and did a dist-upgrade to testing.  It now 
runs fine.  However I've lost most of my hair and several stone in weight
getting there!!!

Anyone have any ideas why the sarge installer wouldn't see the drives in
either machine?  In the desktop I tried the standard distribution CD1,
the minimal install CD and the floppy install set.  In the toshiba
(which has no CD drive) I just tried the floppy set.  None of them would
see any IDE drives.

These are old machines, but they do have very mainstream EIDE hardware
and I've installed several distributions on both machines with no
problems in the past.

Anyone?  Apologies for the length of this email, btw!!!!

Cheers
-- 
Ronan
e: ronan at thelittledot.com
t: 01903 739 997

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