Now, having run the testing net install and selected the correct SATA driver, the installer was able to find my HD, the partitioner was able to partition the free space, and the installation ended successfully. SUCCESSFULLY??
Upon rebooting, this is the message I received:
I found some documentation on the problem, but my knowledge is not enough to understand what is going on. Briefly:PIVOT_ROOT: NO SUCH FILE OR DIRECTORY
/SBIN/INIT: 432: CANNOT OPEN DEV/CONSOLE: NO SUCH FILE
KERNEL PANIC: ATTEMPTED TO KILL INIT!
apparently the SATA drivers handle partitions differently, swapping places (or drive IDs ??) to partitions, so that after rebooting, the system looks for the init in the wrong partition. This is the pivot_root problem. A suggested solution is to edit GRUB (I think, can't remember exactly) changing the drive name from hda to sda, whatever this means. But the people were talikng about problems in upgrading from kernel 2.4 to 2.6, and not doing a fresh install. BTW, seems like SATA drives were handled better in kernel 2.4
I really don't understand how I can possibly access grub, or any other Linux file for that matter, if I don't have a working Linux system. I doubt I can do such a thing with Windows. Maybe a recovery disk or something?
I would also need someone who could really drive me step by step through the process, as my Linux knowledge is <0
A final consideration: is it possible that I am the only one who needs to install Debian on a SATA drive? Or have I the only problematic SATA drive? How can it be that noone else has problems like me? Wouldn't it me a good idea for the Debian staff to look into this SATA problem seriously? Can my problem be considered as a bug?
Again (and for the second day in a row), if someone could be so kind as to help me out, I would really appreciate it...
And to think that yeasterday morning the install on my other computer went so smoothly. I could hardly believe it was so easy setting up Debian.