I'm a WinXP user right now, but am extrememly interested in switching to Linux. I decided to go with Debian for various reasons. I got Partition Magic and cut down my 80 gig hardrive and formatted 10 gigs into Fat32. I took my Debian CD (downloaded the image file) and booted with it. I followed the instructions to begin installing. It looked like it was checking all my hardware thats on my computer. Right after it got done listing all my hardrive partitions (2 are NTFS and 1 FAT32) it said something about IDE and freezes up. Does anybody know if i'm supposed to type anything? is it maybe a problem with my CD? Please help! Also I have a Knoppix CD and it can't recognize any of my Hardrives. Could these problems be related?

Welcome to the wonderful world of free software. It may seem scary and uncomfortable at first, but when one gets accustomed to the ways of the penguin, its difficult to turn back. Debian may not be the easiest flavour to cut your teeth on, but it is certainly one of the finest.

You will need at least two partitions for your Debian install, a small swap partition (82 linux swap) of approximately 512MB should suffice and a larger one (83 linux) to contain the root file system. However, it is not necessary to format them as the Debian installer will handle this task -- you should format the partitions as "swap" for swap and "ext3" for root.

Of course, this is all moot if the installer can't have access to your hard drive. The Debian installer for Sarge should support most IDE and some SATA hardware and I recommend using it over Woody:

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

I have used some live CDs that fail hard drive detection so I would not make quick assumptions here. Please post more specs of your hardware if you continue to have trouble.

thanks for your prompt reply! i tried what you said with no luck - so here are some stats i gathered:
i have a Maxtor 6y080m0 ATA Disk Drive
when i put in the Debian CD the last 4 lines it gives me read this:
HDA: Samsung DVD-ROM SD-616e ATAPI CDROM drive
HDB: Philips DVD+/-RW DVD 8631 ATAPI CDROM drive
IDE: Maxtor 6y080m0 ATA Disk Drive
Ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7, 0x3f6 on irq 14

I sure hope this help, and that you can help me! thank you!

I have seen a number of posts about problems partitioning with P/Magic and Linux partitioning. Perhaps try using M$ fdisk to do the fat partition and then leave the balance of the space empty. From a personal point of view I have not had this experience and did use PM to partition my drive for fat and ext2 when I first installed Debian because I found it a bit easier to use than the cfdisk with which I was unfamiliar at the time. I had no problem and Debian recognised and used the partition quite happily.

Hmm.... I was digging around the Debian site and realized a few possible problems. I have a Dell dimension 4700 -- I should be downloading the I386 package - right? Should I maybe be downloading a different binary (vanilla, multiboot, etc)?

You should be using the i386 as this is intended for IBM-pc clones. The other binaries are for Mac, Sun and Sparc systems, I think.