Hi,

I am trying to install debian for the first time. I downloaded debian-amd64 5.04 installer images and made DVDs.

I booted with disk one in the DVD drive. Early on in the process, the installer says "No common CD-ROM was detected".
I worked around this by taking the DVD out of the DVD drive, and instead inserting it into a USB DVD drive that I plugged into the PC.
The installer found the DVD in this new location, and continued.

But soon a new error: "No disk drive was detected".

Questions:
Does the combination of both these errors pinpoint a particular problem?
Is it possible that my hardware is too new for debian 5.04 (I just bought it a week ago), and that I just need to wait for a new version to come out?

Thanks!!
Grant

Yes. It doesn't seem to be finding your chipset, or it has issues with interrupts, or your box generally. Too little info to be sure. If you were installing a 32 bit OS on a 64 bit chipset, this sort of thing.


Hardly. Debian is patient.You may not have enough ram. What's in your box?

Thanks for the reply. It's a 64-bit machine; CPU is Intel i5 750 on Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 motherboard and with 4G RAM. I have two WDC 500G ATA hard disks, with Windows7 running on one and the other yet to be formatted. DVD drive is ATA also; it's a TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S233C. Graphics card is nVidia GeForce GTX470.

When the installer was first starting, I very briefly saw an error message which said something about USB and error -84, but it disappeared too fast for me to read all of it in time.

I was advised elsewhere to try out the alpha release of the new debian installer (version 6, codename "squeeze"). It worked fine. Seems like the new installer is better able to cope with my particular (SATA) hard disk controller.

Please mark your post [SOLVED] so others can make use of the info.

Thanks, Tom