[SWLUG] debian wierdness

[Phil Downer]

Does anyone have any suggestions for the following problem before I go 
dismantling my entire machine :)

I have decided to reinstall Debian on my main machine, resons being I'd 
like to swab hda and hdb because I was previously running a 13gb drive 
as hda and a 30gb drive as hdb. I also wanted to sort out a load of 
cruft and reorganise everything.

So I've swabbed the jumpers so that hda is now the 30gb and hdb is the 
13gb. I've then kept a working system by changing fstab/lilo on hdb to 
use the correct partitions on the new hdb, as if noithing has changed. 
This now means that if I want to boot into my old system I just go in to 
the BIOS and disable the 30gb drive. It's not the best way, but it works.

So anyway on with the install, I have the same debian disks that I used 
to originally set up this machine. When I get to the network setup the 
install fails to recognise my DHCP server, also if I try to configure it 
manually it doesn't see the network.

Now the card is working fine, because if I boot in to the old system 
it's working. The DHCP server is fine because my parents machine can get 
IP addresses from it, I also have another machine here with the same 
revision/make of NIC and that installed debian whilst recognising the 
dhcp server 2 nights ago.

Just to make sure, I have tried swapping the card from my other machine 
in to this one - same result.

I'm sure I didn't have these problems the first time round and I'm 
downloading the latest debian disks atm because my cds are quite old 
now: potato test-cycle-1.

any insight would be appreciated :)

Phil.