Original date: Sun Jun 27 11:16:29 EST 2004
When installing Debian on a Dell PowerEdge 750, i found that the SATA driver (ata_piix) has a bug which prevents access to the CD-ROM. Fedora Core 1 has a patch for this built into the kernel, but Debian sarge (at least in the TC1 2.6 installer kernel) does not.
To work around this, i did the following:
- Boot from the install CD and type linux26 at the boot prompt.
- Select your installation language and keyboard layout at the prompts.
- The installer will now detect hardware and load the appropriate drivers. Wait until this is finished and it begins loading installer components.
- Switch to virtual console 2 (Alt-F2) and press enter to get a shell.
- Type 'modprobe ata_piix'. This will enable the SATA drives and make it possible to partition and install.
I haven't worked out how to get the installer to create partitions in my preferred layout under Fedora Core (which is a small /boot as ext3 on RAID 1, followed by the rest of the drive as an LVM PV on top of RAID 1), but i'm sure this will come eventually.
Updated installer
Since i originally wrote this tip, Joey Hess and his team have done a lot more work on the installer, and it now natively supports LVM on software RAID 1. Kudos to the Debian installer team! To use this configuration, just download a recent installer from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/.