HI
this is my first debian install. (actually i tried it years ago, but was to impatient to figure out how to make it work)

Sid is working great so far.
Just a problem mounting '/dev/sda?'

i have two main data partitions:
/dev/hda6 /home reiserfs defaults 0 2
/dev/sda6 /home/data reiserfs defaults 0 2

(/dev/sda is an SATA drive. promise drivers.)

when fstab gets processed during boot i get an error saying /dev/sda6 does not exist

if i set the mount to 0 0 , it doesn't hold the system on boot of course, but it still doesn't get mounted. mount will process the line in fstab fine after boot.

Maybe you need to load the sata driver from ramdisk, so it will be available when fstab is read.

I ran into this problem myself with a SATA RAID machine I have. My solution, which is not really the best solution (the RAMdisk is probably the best method, or compiling the driver for the SATA chipset into the kernel), was to create a script in /etc/init.d and have it run after everything else does.

how do i load the driver into ramdisk?

I am not sure on Debian. Usually you run mkinitrd -m <module> to include the specified module into initrd.