I can successfully install Windows XP, no problems on my new SATA drive.

But I cant seem to install Debian 3.1 32 bit DVD edition alongside
Windows XP. It simply does not see the SATA drive. Debian 3.1 install no
problems using an IDE hard drive.

My PC specs are:

AMD Athlon 3700+ 64 bit processor.
512MB DDR 400.
Nvida Geforce 6800
Two IDE CD-Rom / DVD as Primary and Primary Slave.
160 Maxtor GB SATA Hard Drive.
Nforce N-F4 Ultra D Motherboard.

The Debian installation boots than when the moment arrive when the
installer look for the hard drive. The installer hangs?

Any advice would be helpful.

Cheers,

Bob

Boaby wrote the following on 10/2/2005 9:51 AM:
From
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/debian-installer/

_SATA driver can block access to CD drive in installations from CD. On
systems having a SATA IDE controller that also has the CD drive
connected to it, you may see the installer hanging during hardware
detection for the CD drive or failing to read the CD just afterwards. A
possible reason is that the SATA driver (ata_piix and maybe others) is
blocking access to the CD drive.

You can try to work around this by booting the installer in expert mode
and, in the "Detect and mount CD-ROM" step, selecting only the drivers
needed for CD support. These are (ide-)generic, ide-cd and isofs.
The drivers needed to access the disk will still be loaded, but at a
later stage. By loading the CD drivers before the SATA driver in this
way, you may be able to complete the installation. Note that CD-ROM
access may still be an issue after rebooting into the installed system.

--
Beauty is only epithelial cells deep.