[lug] Trouble installing Debian

[J. Wayde Allen]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Glenn Murray wrote:

> The install boots from the CD but is unable to find the hard drive.
> 
> The machines are:
> 
> Dell Dimension XPS T800r, BIOS version A09
> 
> Setup reports the zip and cd on the secondary IDE controller,
> and Win2K reports  the hard drive controller as
> 
> WDC WD20 4BA SCSI Disk Device
> 
> Neither of the two boot options "aic7xxx=..." helps.

Evidently your SCSI driver is not being recognized.  From your Win2K info
it looks like you have a Western Digital controller?  If that is correct
the system "should" recognize it, but it is usually prudent to double
check the hardware compatibility lists just to be sure it is
supported.

Without digging in to this any deeper I'm wondering why you are trying to
set the aic7xxx= options?  What happens if you don't do anything at
all?  Can the system autodect your SCSI controller?  The other thing to
check is IRQ's.  I've seen the kind of behavior you are talking about if
the SCSI controller is at a different IRQ than the default value compiled
into the driver.  In that case, you simply need to specify the correct IRQ
as a driver option.

- Wayde
  (wallen at its.bldrdoc.gov)