Against my better judgement, I tried installing Debian on my nForce2 system. As I already knew a lot of the stuff on it wouldn't work, especially the LAN interface, I planned to install Woody from a 3.0r1 CD I got from a magazine cover, get the LAN device working and upgrade everything to Sid before installing a 2.4.22 kernel to get everything else on the board working. Unfortunately, I hit a snag: The Woody installer, even in bf2.4 flavour, lacks a driver for my Silicon Image SiI680-based PCI ATA133 controller and therefore can't see the Western Digital WD1200JB HDD hanging off it.

Is there a way I can get Woody on to this box without pulling it apart (to move the HDD onto the on-board ATA133 controllers)? Loading driver modules from floppy is probably out of the question as my "floppy drive" is an LS-120 drive connected via ATAPI and I'm not sure if ide-floppy support for it is loaded properly (and I don't want to open the machine up to fit a conventional floppy drive as, due to the cabling inside my case, it's a real bitch). The netinstall is also out of the question as drivers for my nForce2 MCP onboard LAN interface are provided on the netinstall CDs because Debians ridiculous policies exclude it and I don't want to fit a supported LAN card just to get the damn OS installed. Is it still possible to install Debian under these circumstances or is it best I give up and label Debian an archaic, backward POS totally out of touch with reality?

Well - I just gave up on debian for now in a similar situation.But I think you should be able to get it installed by chrooting into it from an existing Linux install and modify the kernel that way.Might give that a shot one time.

The big problem here isn't that Debian doesn't support nForce2, bf24 appears to support it enough to get it installed (it's no worse than Slackwares default kernel in terms of specific nForce2 support and I was able to install that just fine) except that without a driver for the SiI680, it isn't able to see my HDD and claims that I don't have one at all. I could open the machine up and move the cables around so that its on the onboard controllers but that's messy and I'd like to avoid it if at all possible.

It's supposed to work with kernels 2.4.20 upward and CMD64X and CMD680 support compiled.Unfortunately bf2.4 is a 2.4.18 kernel if I remember this correct.

I had a look through the Debian installation guide and came across this:

http://www.debian.org/releases/stabl...-linux-upgrade

After a few tries I managed to get it to work and now have a fully bootable Debian Woody system complete with 2.4.22 kernel. It still has a few rough edges but I'm hoping to get most of those ironed out with the upgrade to Sid.

Cool - good find.I am off installing.

heh, I just noticed there's a Gentoo ebuild for the debootstrap program, I'll have to remember that if I'm ever insane enough to try this again...

This keeps getting better and better.Maybe they should put up a howto for nforce users at debian:
Step one: install gentoo