Intel AHCI SATA problems.

[gozzer999]

I'm new to Linux and trying to install the latest Debian sarge release on my Dell 8400 with 250G SATA drive. This drive has WinXP on 200G partition and the other 50G is waiting on Sarge!

Here's what I've done so far.
Downloaded the full install DVD "debian-31r0a-i386-binary-1.iso" and “debian-31r0a-i386-binary-2.iso". Checked md5checksum to make sure the .iso's were good. Burned iso's to DVD's using Alcohol 120%
Placed DVD in cd/dvdrom drive, and booted from installation disc.
Debian installer starts up. I typed in linux26 at prompt to load kernel 2.6.8. All goes well until the installer tries to find the cdrom. It says that no cdrom found. This is odd since I'm running the installer off of the cdrom. Upon further googling, I found on Debian's website in the Debian GNU/Linux 3.1r0 Errata section.

"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

So I went back and installed under "expert26", I was able to select the only the drivers for cd support as stated above. Then when it came time to partition the SATA hard drive but it could not be found.

So after some more googling I came across this http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/Apr.shtml

Since the person in the like above has the same system as I do (except for the hard drive size) I decided to give it a shot. And what do you know I got Debian Sarge Kernel 2.6.8 installed.

My only problem now is how to upgrade to kernel 2.6.11 so that I can turn Intel's AHCI SATA controller back on and be able to use GRUB to boot Debian and WinXP. Since I'm really new to Linux I decided to Google for the instructions with no luck. I guess I'm just not proficient enough with Linux app's or commands any help in installing a new kernel would be greatly appreciated.

[Guest]

Thanks for this post, it helped me install 3.1 on a Dell PWS370, as I was seeing that exact problem with the 2.6 kernel, but it would not detect the SATA disk with 2.4 kernel.

I use an exact same machine with Fedora core 4, and it had no issues, so this issue needs to be feed back to the Netinstall coders.