Dropping to shell during install
 

I'm here because I am a :newbie: to linux.

First I want to give a little back ground to show where I am at with this. My primary purpose with my hone systems and here at the linux questions is to learn.

I have loaded a few distros from cd and running from cd played around a little. I have loaded Suse 10.2 successfully on a system. I am still playing with it. I got Mandriva working somewhat. I am also pretty good with that other operating system. I want to get away from that and get with the program! or operating system as the case may be! hahaha

I have a computer that I built and want to eventually set up as a home office networking server. After working at a few installs I decided I should go the rout of Debian. The reason being, its a good basic place to start.

Anyway, during Debian install I went with install acpi=off This got the install pretty far along. With acpi on it locks up.

So where I am and what I need help with it this:
Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules Is /dev

Alert! /dev/mapper/office-root does not exist. Dropping to shell!

When it comes to text I am lost and in need of guidance. I am not sure what this means. I end up with a blinking curser.

Thanks

update
 

Well nobody has responded but I have not been idle today. Its my day off. :)

I have been working to resolve my issues with debian loading and have a break through.

installgui acpi=off irqpoll HIGHDMA scsi1=sata_nv scsi2=sata_nv scsi3=sata_nv scsi4=sata_nv

this seems to get me deeper into the process and the parts where linux is attempting to recognize my hardware.

During discovery of the 4 SATA hard drives it was taking 15 minutes per drive and now it is flying on through. Next issue for this :newbie: !

Now for some reason the boot loader won't install. It finally gives me this message. You will need to boot manually with the /vmlinuz kernal on partition /dev/mapper/debian-root and root=/devmapper/debian-root passed as a kernal argument.

Any ideas out there?