[lug] Trouble installing Debian

[J. Wayde Allen]

On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Glenn Murray wrote:

> My understanding now is that I have a Promise Technology card for
> an ultra-ATA/66 (IDE) interface, and I need a Linux driver for this
> card.  I am told that what I need is on the distribution CDs; the
> directory dists/potato/main/disks-i386/current/udma66/ contains
> three files, viz.:
> 
> drivers.tgz
> install.bat
> linux
> 
> but no Readme, so I am a little at a loss.

The Readme is at <http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/install>.

> The drivers tarball includes
> an install.sh script and from puzzling over it and install.bat it seems
> that the install.bat script is to be run somewhere it can find
> dosutils; it will create a boot floppy (?) which will apparently run
> the script to install the kernel modules "onto the root filesystem."
> [Confusion: I have no root filesystem, yet; does it mean a root filesystem
> on the floppy?  But the drivers tarball won't fit on the floppy, etc.]
> 
> My question is: how do I use the files above with the installation CDs so
> that the installation program can find the hard drive?

Since you are doing a floppy based install you need to get the floppy
images and create raw images of the floppy disks.  That means using
rawrite.exe if you are doing this from DOS/Windows or 

  dd if=file of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 conv=sync ; sync

if you are building them from a Linux machine.  I don't know anything
about the files you mentioned above.  It kind of sounds like these might
be used to install from an existing DOS partition on a dual boot machine.  

If you haven't read the info at
<http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-install-methods.en.html>
you should probably do so, especially seciton "5.2 Choosing the Right
Installation Set".

Based on what you've said above I think that all you
probably need to do is get the file at
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/udma66/rescue.bin
and rawrite this to a 1.44 MByte floppy.  This should then have the
necessary driver and would be used to boot your system.

- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)