LOL i have 2 at uni and 1 taking her gcse's bit late for that now
it is a acer aspire 1362 wlmi
specs 80 gig hard drive 1.5 gig of ram
and a geforce fx go 5200 64 meg
and dvd r wr
amd sempron 2800+
i down loaded debian and put it on a disc but when installing it it could not find the hard drive, in dos looked for fat 32 and a nfts so i must be doing something wrong some where, can it be a clean install or does it have to have an existing opperating system on it i put win xp pro on it to try but still no joy

devigate,

A clean install is best, in my opinion. Forget about XP.

Download and burn a gParted CD. Boot from it and then delete all existing partitions (having backed up any personal data which is needed).

http://gparted.org/index.php

http://gparted.org/help.php

http://gparted.org/download.php

Then create a new partition table and partition the drive, something like this:

15GB, sda1 format partition as ext4 and mount as / (root)
2GB, sda2 swap partition
Rest of drive, sda3 format partition as ext4 and mount as /home

Exit gParted and boot from Linux DVD.

Choose Something Else or Manual when you reach the partitioning section of the Linux installation.

Put MBR on sda.

Don't be afraid of "expert install" or "advanced install," it will give more options making things easier.

When I was newer or with unpopular hardware will often download many distros and just keep installing and testing to see what's good.

jamison:- mounting a usb stick on antiX is a case in point.

devigate:- beachboy2 makes a good point, clearing the mbr and creating a new partition table might fix the problem but if the bios is set to boot from the cd/dvd/usb first it should work, providing the downloaded image is ok - check with md5sum or similar, once you have the sum to check against.
Also you could set the bios to not boot from the harddrive and reset it when you rebooted after the install, just to make sure it did n't boot to xp.

Fred.

Linux Lite is very hard to beat when it comes to learning Linux-especially a person used to Windoze. Get any or all distros at distrowatch.com.

"Fred Caro"
"Also you could set the bios to not boot from the harddrive and reset it when you rebooted after the install, just to make sure it did n't boot to xp."
Thank you for that but i had already done that one of the things i remembered from the old days , i am still overwhelmed with the support i am getting from real people and not an computerised response

i will let you know i did on the install i have downloaded the partitioning tool try as soon i have time