I have recently downloaded and Debian 3.1 and started working through the installation process and have encountered something that is different about the Debian Installer disk than most of the Linux variations that I am familiar with (Redhat Slackware Gentoo Fedora) that is hanging me up somewhat. Basically, the normal hd devices in /dev don't seem to exist. So for example if I boot into the installer in 'expert' mode and then drop into a shell and try to 'fdisk /dev/hda' it is not possible because the device doesn't seem to exist:

I suspect this has something to do with the 'udev' package not being available on the installer but I very rarely deal with linux on this level so I'm not sure. There *is* a device that looks like:

located in the /dev directory and it appears that the Debian installer manipulates the disk in this manner but I can't seem to run fdisk on this device either. So I am wondering if someone could offer up some clues for accessing the disk directly?

The installer should detect the ATA drive without udev installed.

Might you have a serial ATA hard drive, which would then become /dev/sda? Or, you may have it plugged into IDE 2 or not have have the jumpers on your drive set correctly, which would make it /dev/hdb, c or d. I'm reaching here.

Try a live CD like MepisLite, which is basically Etch, and see if the drive is picked up in fstab.

Gentoo ; Slackware ; Redhat ; Knoppix all seem to allow direct disk access without these types of headaches.

There are two IDE disks in the system. The plan is to mirror them in a RAID1 set. One criteria I have for using a Linux Distro is that it be able to install directly onto a a software RAID1 mirrored set of IDE disks ; which Debian wasn't able to do in version 3.0 but now the installer is capable of it in version 3.1. This type of "poor mains raid" is what I use in my production servers. I set the mbr of both disk to be bootable and then if one disk dies the system will still boot and retain all data.

Since I'm digressing a little here I'll mention that my ultimate goal is a set of instructions for installing Debian 3.1 onto mirrored disks by bypassing the guided partitioning tool. So I will need to partition the disks, create raid devices and then filesystems to format and install onto. The reason for bypassing the guided partitioning tool is for reproducibility and instructional purposes. Much in the same way the linux from scratch team ( www.linuxfromscratch.org ) often take the long way around in order to offer additional insights and learning. You can see an example of how I have written this up for installing slackware @ http://slackware.hostinghacks.net/install/ which makes extensive use of command line tools such as sfdisk and raidtools instead of the GUI partitioning tool.

So back to the core problem which is that the Debian installer disk seems to fall short of what I would expect of a live cd in terms of granting full access to the disk. It is possible that this is an oversight on the part of the Debian installer dev team but more likely there is simply an expectation of accessing the disk more directly than the way that I am used to. Here are some more clues I have come across:

Here is the output of 'ls -la /proc/ide'

As you can see the system does recognize the ide drives.

Another note of interest is that if I use the guided partitioning tool to create a raid device it does so successfully and offers up a choice like follows:

(note the equivalent partitions on seperate buses)

Google found this:
Installing Debian with SATA based RAID

That is good stuff. I used to do it that way... install onto a single disk and then mirror. But now the debian installer can install directly onto /dev/md disks.

The kernel seems to know about them and the installer manipulates them quite well ; even going as far as to mount the drives onto a directory labeled '/target'. In fact, I suspect that the installer is just a frontend to the 'mount' 'sfdisk' and 'mdadm' commands that are locate in /sbin on the installer cd. If this is the case then I would simply need to know the commands which are directed a little closer to the hardware level (e.g. sfdisk /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3) . If this is the case and '/dev/hda' is just a shortcut to something a little less human readable then what I actually need is to locate this kernel level lingo.

my preference is to use 'sfdisk' from the command line as a partitioner. The installer does seem to do a good job though so I may have to forego this 'sfdisk' fetish. But I do feel as if I am nearing an epiphany if I can just figure this one thing out...

Hitting 'devfs' around google was quite helpful. I think that the final verbage that I am going use will be something along these lines: