Ive just tried to install Debian onto my system. I currently have 2000 and RH9 installed on the first hard disk and I opened up some space on my second hd but neither seem to be seen when I try to install.

I am using three maxtor hard disks that are ata 133. Could this be a bios problem? Maybe my bios cannot detect the disks because they are so large? When I originally installed win2000, I had to partition before the first disk could be recognized. Now of course they are already partitioned....

Can I install debian onto a partition while running RH9? Just wondering. I am reluctant to try to open up space on the first disk since I would have to redo my RH install and because I dont think that seeing the hard disk should have anything to do with whether or not there is space available on the disk.

The RH install had no problems... I just want to try out Debian.

Is the second HDD on some kind of secondary IDE/RAID controller? That could be why Debian isn't recognising it, it isn't loading the necessary drivers to detect the controller.

Well, Debian doesnt seem to be able to see any of my hard disks. I dont know what the reason could be. When I installed RH, everything was taken care of. Every component in my computer is only two years old--I put it all together.

My motherboard uses the Highpoint 372 IDE controller but I am not using RAID on my machine. The hard disks themselves are Maxtor and although they are not SCSI, that is how they show up in win2000.

My motherboard has 4 IDE channels...maybe Debian cannot see the hard disks on the ultra DMA 133 channels...

Anyway, when I install Debian, is there a way to tell the install where the hard disks should be so that when the bios fails to detect them I can bipass the problem?

Well, I just figured out that by placing my hard disks on the first IDE as opposed to the third IDE Debian was able to see the disks. Oddly enough now win2000 is unable to read from them.... Anyway, I guess I will install onto them and then move them back to their original position and hope that Debian can handle it. I figure its just the installer that is having difficulty. Thanks for you advice though!

when you boot into your debian installer are you using the bf24 kernel? Instead of pressing enter at the first boot prompt are you entering bf24?

I think the debian problem is because your kernel can't see the drives on the hpt controller chip, but it does see the drive(s) on the "normal" ide channel. You may want to check out this page:
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/usaindex.htm
and do some google searching.

~rock

am experiencing a problem. i tried to install RHL - 9 on my Compaq Presario PC and got a msg "No Hard Drives detected". However Windows is running on my PC and when i tried to install Ubuntu-Linux for Human Beings, it detected the presence of the hard drive and showed the existing partitions.

I tried to find the HDD driver thru windows but got nothing matching with the manually loadable drivers in RHL that r listed during installation.

the hard disk in my PC is a SATA one and its number is WDC- followed by some numbers.

plz,can anyone bail me out from this predicament?

RH9 is pretty old and probably doesn't have support for SATA at all.. if you wish to try out RedHat, get Fedora Core (I think current version is 5 now..) it should detect your SATA drive with no trouble just like Ubuntu did