[nzlug] Debian Installation Woes

[Warren]

>>> Strange error. I switched over to the logging screen and found no
>>> problems there. In my desperation I decided to just unplug all the
>>> hard drives except the one that I want to install Linux on. And sure
>>> enough, it installed just fine. Hopefully when I plug all the other
>>> harddrives back in it'll work like a working thing. About to try it in
>>> a few minutes...
>>> 
>> 
>> Let us know.
>> 
>> --
>> Michael
> 
> Finally ready to cry. I did the installation (Yes I had done it
> previously but only far enough to know if it worked - I had used
> defaults on everything and it would be quicker just to do the
> installation again rather than trying to fix everything by hand) and
> this time when I rebooted the bios threw me a curve ball.
> 
> Now everytime I boot up it throws up an error. Something along the
> lines of "No master ide h.d.d. found. Press F1 to continue". This had
> me scratching my head so I decided to try changing hard drives. Same
> error again. Checked the jumpers on the hard drives and the cdrom
> drive, tried a different cdrom drive. No joy, the error still comes
> up.
> 
> This is starting to sound like a bigger problem than I originally thought.

That's the bios telling you it doesn't have the details for the hard drive.
Either the battery is flat, you've accidentally erased the bios (by shorting
the two pins on the mobo)

Alternatively - if you've set the hard drive parameters to autodetect ...
Then you could have a faulty IDE cable or your hard drive has given up the
ghost.

I have in the past gotten around BIOS limits by only having grub installed
on an old bigfoot (anyone remember them!) which then pointed at my "real"
hard drive.  So, all my bios new about was the big foot (Which the discs
where on their way out, but the boot sector was fine...

Good luck,
Warren.