I'm trying to install Debian Lenny (20070719 netinst) on a new system with a biostar tp35d2-a7 (p35) motherboard and all SATA devices.

The installer starts up and looks for the CD/DVD device and can't find it. I tried "libata.atapi_enabled=1" but that didn't seem to make a difference. (Much of the information I encountered online about these sort of problem looked like it was too old to be relevant.)

I dug out an old IDE CD drive and hooked it up and tried again. Now the system identifies the IDE drive and the network but then it is unable to detect the SATA hard drives.

It suggests that I should pick a driver off the list. As I understand it, the right driver is ata-piix, which does not appear on the list. I tried running "modprobe ata-piix" in a different console and selecting "Detect disks" again from the installer menu, but it still fails to find the disks.

So it appears that none of the SATA things work. How can I get the SATA devices to work?

Debian still has issues with booting from SATA devices. I suggest to use an IDE disk for your system to reside on and use the SATA disk(s) as storage (your /home directories).

I see talk of people getting SATA devices to work with various linux distributions 2 years ago, so SATA itself is not new. Really, Debian can't handle it???

(Or could it be some specific issue with support for ICH9 which is new?)

Debian can use SATA, but it's standard kernel has not yet implemented SATA drivers build in so booting from SATA isn't yet available. Mind you, the emphasis in Debian is on stability, not the latest and greatest in Linux-land. If you're after that, use one of those other distro's.

?

I'm running off of a SATA drive right now? Boots and works just fine?

SATA support isn't even available in testing yet? It looks like the testing kernel is 2.6.18 which could maybe be a problem as I read P35 requires 2.6.20. But if that's true then it'll presumably be impossible to use any SATA devices until I upgrade the kernel, whether or not I'm trying to boot off of them.

what sort of SATA are we talking about? Because I have both a SATA harddrive and an SATA DVD drive. Both boot and work just fine. I installed with an IDE cd drive because my DVD drive hadn't arrived yet, but the harddrive works just fine.

I installed off of the testing netinstall cd for AMD64 about 2 - 3 weeks ago.

same here and have been for about a year.

What do you mean by "what sort of SATA"? The motherboard is a P35 with ICH9. The SATA devices are

Western Digital Caviar: WD1600AAJS
SAMSUNG DVD burner: SH-S183L

I would blame the motherboard and not the drives.

The current kernel in testing is 2.6.21-2, so if the proper drivers became available in 2.6.20 you might be able to get it working with the latest kernel. I don't know how you would go about installing with it though...

When I looked at the kernel packages in testing it looked to me like the current kernel was 2.6.18, whereas unstable had the 2.6.21 kernel. Did I miss something?

The current daily build of testing has 2.6.21. I just downloaded the business install cd to check. I would guess that the net install is the same deal.

Edit: You can get the daily builds off of this link:

http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

I checked my kernel version on the install CD and it is 2.6.21-6, so looks like I can't blame my problems on an antiquated kernel.

I have discovered that by selecting "legacy" in the bios config options for IDE that I can detect the hard drive. (I haven't tried unplugging the IDE CD drive to see if it will find the DVD at install.)

Is there any downside to using this "legacy" setting?

I would think that it working would outweigh any downsides... And if it's an IDE setting and you have an SATA drive, it shouldn't really affect much of anything should it?