OK I have been using ubuntu for a while and wanted to give etch a try, having installed debian before without too much of a hassle, the etch net install cd cant find my cdrom which is an atapi DVDR, so i downloaded 2 iso cd's and there doesnt seem to be any manual editing available of youyr hard discs which are partitioned and ready to go all that happens is it wipes my 2x 250Gb NTFS drives completely and says it couldnt proceed, the drive i want to install debian onto is a 120Gb IDE drive, and like i said has the swap space and 2 partitions one for / and one for /home, but the installer doesnt allow you to setup the partitions, anyone know how this works?

Cheers

MunCH

That's a heck of a long sentence.

Which cdrom do you mean, the cdrom the install cd is on, or a secondary cdrom? If you mean the netinstall cd is not booting, and other cds do boot, then it is most likely a bad cd burn or download. Use md5 checksums to check both the download and the burned cd.

Are you sure? Because any time I've ever installed Debian (at least a dozen times), including recently with the testing (beta 1) net-installer, there was most certainly an option to manually edit the partitions.

It could be that you don't have a reliable version of the net-installer. Make sure you download Debian-installer etch beta 1 (3.1r1) and not one of the daily builds:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

Thanks for the reply, yes it cant use the cdrom(only one on my system)with the net install cd(checked the cdrom integrity and it was OK, the etch iso cd didnt have this problem but absolutely no option other that automatic hard drive partitioning, which is kind of pointless really.

Cheers

MunCH

I agree that's not very useful. However, I can tell you I installed etch from the beta 1 net installer a week and a half ago, and I definitely was able to partition by hand: I set up new /boot, /, /usr, /home, /tmp and /var partitions, complete with options, and some for ext3 and some for XFS.

I haven't used the etch full-cd version, but I can't imagine that they would remove the manual partitioning. Something might have gotten messed up in a copy of the weekly builds, which is why it's probably best to get the beta 1 version of the net-installer, since it's a known working "snapshot".

As for the net-install cdrom not working, I can only think that there must have been a mistake in the burning of the image. The net-install is also an ISO image and has to be burned using "burn image". The Debian FAQ can help you better than me:
http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#bootable
http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#verify
http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#record-unix
http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#record-windows

Edit: stupid forum burned me again, I was typing, hit some key combo, and BANG, the message was incomplete but submitted.