Please help with installation problem on IBM NetVista desktop

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

Bill Horne wrote:
> Thanks for reading this.
> 
> I'm trying to put Debian Sarge on an IBM NetVista desktop machine, but
> it dies just at the point the Debian installer is detecting the hard
> disks. If you have experience with the NetVista machines, please pass
> along any info you have about drivers and hardware compatibility.

Wild guess is that either the ide driver is flakey, or the partition table is
screwy.  For what it's worth, the kernel that shipped with FC6 had this
annoying property that it would probe my Intel SATA controller, and since I
had no SATA disks, it would just wait and timeout (it took over a minute to do
just that step in the bootup).  Later kernels fixed that problem though...

If you think it's your partition table, you can clear it (and the mbr) with dd
if you have a liveCD of any sort that you can boot into:
 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

Finally, (or maybe try this first) you might tinker with BIOS settings (like
"PnP OS", or any "compatibility" options).

HTH,
Matt

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