Ah, I used to want to make fun of all the people that say they are having a hard time installing debian. Have woody up and running on my desktop, with no effort at all. Currently working on a laptop - I have a HP pavilion N5435 laptop, ~900 MHz celeron, 256 RAM, hitachi 10 G hd, toshiba DVD-ROM, floppy, ethernet with cable connection.

Unfortunatley the DVD-ROM has seen better days, during install, it will crash at various stages and I have to start all over. So, I decided to try the network install. Still need the CD player. I am currently working on installing by floppy, then the network. My problem with this is that at the partitioning stage, no hd shows up, I can't partition whats not there. And it won't let me skip this step. The hd does show up if I install the CD drivers, but then the install goes to the CD rom and crashes. I have tried partitioning with the CD drivers installed, then going back and reloading the network drivers, in hopes that the installer would then look to the network, but this has yet been unsuccesful.

The sarge install manual mentions installing by usb storage. I do have an external usb CDR, but don't know how to direct the installer to this CD for the install.

Any suggestions are welcome, thanks

asb

I haven't personally tried to boot usb CD-ROM, so what follows is mere speculation.

If your BIOS doesn't support booting from usb CD-ROM, you could try first booting from FeatherLinux's boot floppy that is designed to help booting an usb device. You can find the image file, bootusb.img, from here:

ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/featherlinux/

Feather is based on Knoppix, so it might just work with the Debian installer also. No guarantees, though.

no good. That boot image was looking for a knoppix file of some kind. I also couldn't direct the boot to the usb cdrom, no read light blinking

thanks though