I'm attempting to install a Debian base (Woody 3.0r1) system on a new pc. I'm running into problems with mount points for the partitions and rebooting. I have two SCSI host controllers, one an LSIU160 for three (3) hard drives and an Adaptec U2W for one wide cd-rom and three narrow drives (Zip, cd-burner and a dvd-rom). The pc itself boots, id's are set correctly and I am able to boot off the Debian cd in the SCSI cd-rom without problems...

The problem is that apparently the cd-rom (or possibly another drive) is "grabbing" sda... The three hard drives "should" be sda, sdb and sdc... Instead they are sdb, sdc and sdd... I can partition the drives fine and mount them. I can install the base system without problems. The problem occurs when I try to reboot the system. Lilo gives me errors about not being able to install to the "first" boot drive (i.e. sda) when I install it in the mbr of sdb... When I then reboot during the install process, Lilo "hangs" at Li.... I'm assuming because of mount problems???

Does anyone have any ideas of how I might work around this problem or what may be causing it?

Thanks in advance for your help!

AFAIK the first recognized controller, the first recognized disk drive will be sda, the next in the chain is sdb etc. Is your zip drive being assigned sda? You can tell from the way the PC boots which controller BIOS scan you see first. What ID is the zip drive set to?

When the pc boots, the LSIU160 controller is scanned first by the bios, however, I believe that when Linux 2.4 loads off the cd for the install process that the Adaptec may be seen first so you may be right... the Zip drive could be grabbing sda... I can't get to the pc right now, but I will check that out.

Is there some way that I can force the installer to scan in a different order? (The LSIU160 is in the #1-64bit pci slot, and the Adaptec U2W is in the #1-32bit pci slot). Thoughts or suggestions??

Thanks!