Hey. I am trying to install debian sarge from cd. I put in the cd, press enter and the installer starts up. I select my language , country, keyboard layout, name my computer, tell the installer that i dont want to set up my network at this time, and off the installer goes.... until it gets to the "loading disk partitioner" (or somthing to this effect) screen. Here it will always halt at 38%, just as it says that it is "scaning drives" or somthing similar. I have tried two different disks. both had good md5sums, and both seemed to have burned fine. I looked at the step by step instalation guide under the "troubleshooting" section and found nothing related to my problem. What is going on, and what can i do?

Thanks,
Charles

Have you got unformatted free disk space on the drive you are trying to install to? Not sure what the installer may do if it can not find any.

How much ram have you got on the system? Look at the install documents to see if you have the minimums.

Yep, i have 3.5 gb free, and i have 128 mbs RAM, which should be enough for graphical mode and surley enough for the text based installer. Besides, i was only insalling the base debian system, no x or gonome or kde.

just got it to work. I was installing with the default 2.4 kernal... didnt work, but when i finaly tried to install with the 2.6 kernal, all went smooth... dont understand it, but i am happy just to have it installed in the first place.

Seems that older kernel couldn't detect yout hard drive properly.

Some distrobutions require that you have some swap space lying around, other distros recommend it for a successful and smooth install. Your problems definitely seem "anormal".


As fact is: Knoppix recommends at least 128Mb of swap if you don't have at least 512Megs of ram.

That overkill on ram reqs I think.

I hate to say this but it think it is necessary: I suggest that you go to debian.org and consult the installation and requirements docs. I never read documentation. Who reads documentation? Not me. I'm serious, the only time I even think about reading documentation is when I get an error or two and only after trying to fiddle with it to see if I can get it to go without reading docs.


Problems that arise from weird hardware can be the hardest to fix without a bit of reading.

I installed 7 unices so far without looking at any measly docs (in order): damn small linux, red hat 9 shrike, freebsd (i was forced to do some reading here), fedora core 3, knoppix, slackware-10.1, Debian (forced again here). That MUST be a record.


generally if you have "freaky hardware", it's old/spanking new/rare/non-standard/ and or just plain-weird, then you might want to read text/docs about the exceptions/advice for those of us with "freaky hardware". I installed damnsmall Linux on my salvaged 133Mhz Pentium 1[ 64Mb ram, 2 ~2GB hard disks, serial, usb 1.1, 1 cdrom that barely worked] retired workstation. I managed to use the system trouble free for months. I bought it for $80 USD including the monitor in 2003-it was 1992-1993 hardware.


I might not have gotten away with on a distro that demands that I (as a newb then) configure 90% of the hardware myself, Debian/Slackware (the distros recommended for the at least moderately experienced/skilled), unlike Knoppix or DamnSmallLinux where I can always get away with not configuring any hardware. All Linuxers go through the phase. I still get nervous when I have a problem with XFree86. Dude, every now and then a Linuxer somewhere has to suck it up and read 3 pages at least while skimming the bulk of it.

Today I have a new Dell Inspiron 1000 that's mainstream, and has popular chip-sets that are common in the Linux hardware world. No more reading documentation, unless stuff gets interesting.

congratulations on you debian installation

I hate to say this but it think it is necessary: I suggest that you go to debian.org and consult the installation and requirements docs. I never read documentation. Who reads documentation? Not me

I do.

I started reading docs right after you did.