I almost titled this post "What am I doing wrong"?

I have been trying to install sarge all week. I downloaded the CD iso from debian.org's master site and booted from the burned CD. But the installer wouldn't see my hard drive. I tried several different drives, but I had the same results on each: I can start the install process, but when it gets to "Partition a hard drive" the install will not proceed. When I select the option, the screen blinks, then the menu returns to the "Partition..." option and the system does nothing. When I switch to ash and run cfdisk, I get a fatal error - cannot access drive. This happens every time on my first system (Pentium 533MHz, AZZA mobo with VAI chipset). To make sure that it wasn't an issue with the drive (Maxtor 40GB) I plugged in a different Maxtor and then a Seagate - same results. After changing out the drives and getting the same errors, I wondered if the installer was have difficulty with my system, so I pulled out another system I have (Pentium IV 1.3GHz, Intel mobo) and tried to install sarge there. Same errors. So, wondering if I have a bad iso image, I downloaded sid, burned it to a CD, and tried to intall it. With sid, I don't get any drive options on the menu - no selection to partition or mount drives. And the same results as sarge when trying to run cfdisk from ash. And all week I have been searching the web, tutorials, and asking questions on mailing lists. So that leaves me wondering "what am I doing wrong"?

Should I be booting from a floppy?

Did I get the correct iso images?

Did I burn the images correctly (I know this probably is not the problem, but I am grasping at straws here)?

Should I be making different selections during the boot process (I am taking the defaults)?

Are there any other questions I should ask?



Any help or links would be greatly appreciated!

I've seen that error before a couple of time... ussually its because there is compatibility issues with the kernel you're trying to install from. In my case it was because I was trying to manipulate a partition which was larger than what the kernel supported. What I had to do was install onto a smaller partition, upgrade to a newer kernel then create the larger partition (we're talking over 1.5TB btw so I don't think this is the problem you're experiencing.)

I'm assuming you're using a 3.0r1 boot image?

Try this one for Debian 3.0r2: http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=4

Actually, I've been trying to install sarge (testing) and sid (unstable). I can get woody working just fine on my systems.

Thanks.

if woody works, you can always do this:
1. install woody, configure what you need
2. apt-cdrom add (for each sarge cd you have)
3. edit /etc/apt/sources.list removing the link to woody and remove the tag "main/debian-installer" from each line in the sarge links.
4. apt-get update
5. apt-get -u dist-upgrade
6. /sbin/lilo
7. reboot