I have two Ultra ATA133 hard drives plugged into a Promise controller. I have Mandrake 9 installed on hda and I want to install Woody bf24 flavor on hdb. I'm booting from disk 1 and the installer can't see my hard drives. I'm told I need to install special modules from a floppy and that's where I get lost. What floppy? What modules? I've read every installation how-to I can find but to no avail. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I'd really like to get past this hurdle so I can get on with things.

Maybe you'd be better off with an idepci image?
http://ftp.debian.org/dists/woody/ma...1/images-1.44/

Remember, that's just to get you going until you can rebuild the kernel for your machine anyway. So whatever works

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Bad idea above maybe. What are you installing from? When I installed Woody I made about six floppies. Boot, root and four driver disks I think. It's been a while but I thought once it was somewhat booted from boot and root it gave the opportunity to start loading drivers. At that point it seems like you need to load the drivers for your network card, sound card, maybe video card, even with a promise card it seems like it should see the hard drives though. I found several promise cards listed in the compatability list, that should be detected...
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Hi, Psycho,
Thanks for your response. I'm booting from disk 1 of seven cds I got from Linux Central. That's the one with bf24. Previous distros I've installed didn't have any trouble detecting my hardware. I expected Debian to be a tougher install but I didn't expect to get hung up right out of the gate.

I have the same ATA board (not too fond of it since I can't get my 200 gig drive detected right). Anyway, if you use Disc 5 Debian will pick up the controller ok. It did for me.

I had this problem with Slackware 8.1 and had to boot from a diffrent image (included on the cdrom), I am currently installing Debian 3.0r0 and had the problem again, i just found the idepci boot disks befoure coming upon this site so ill give them a try.