[lug] Trouble installing Debian

[Glenn Murray]

Thanks for the reply.

Weirdness.  I took the case apart.  The hard drive is a Western Digital
IDE drive connected to a Promise Technology Ultra66 PCI card.  Nothing
is plugged into the motherboard's primary ide controller, which explains
why setup doesn't see it.  Besides the information below, Win2K also
reports that there is a SCSI controller:

Promise Technology Inc Ultra 66 IDE controller (IRQ 09)

On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, J. Wayde Allen wrote:
> 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.

While it is true that I have what appears to be a Western Digital SCSI
controller (not listed in the Hardware How-To as either supported or
unsupported) it is also true that I do not have a SCSI hard drive.

> 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?  

I had to set an aic7xxx option on an older Dell box with an actual SCSI
drive. It makes no difference if I don't set it.

> Can the system autodect your SCSI controller?  

I have no idea.  How would I know?  And do I care anymore?

> 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.

Maybe this is it.  But, uh, how do I do that last simple bit when starting
the install?

> - Wayde

(How, by the way, can an IDE controller be a SCSI controller?)

Thanks for any help,
Glenn