Debian Install Trouble

[TerminaMorte]

This is a laptop (Compaq LTE 5400).

4gb HDD, 150mhz, 82mb ram.

It has a bay for CD-ROM (but cannot boot CDs from it), as well as a PCMCIA CD-Rom drive (which, of course, isn't detected during POST)

I can only have the internal CD-Rom drive, or internal floppy drive hooked up at once. This is a problem, since many boot CDs do not recognize PCMCIA cd-rom drives.

I had Debian installed on this earlier today, but my partitions got messed up when I tried to format my swap partition (while using DSL live CD) to ext3.

So I used a Windows 98 boot disk to fdisk /mbr (grub was giving me an error), remove the partitions, and then format the drive.

I'm trying to reinstall debian, but now I'm getting this message (I know the drive works, I've used it in MS-DOS with the windows boot disk and copied files to it):

No partitionable media
No partitionable media were found.
Please check that a hard disk is attached to this machine.

I've switched to another console, and did 'dmesg | grep hd'. Only hdc shows up (which is my external cd rom drive).

I'm booting debian with floppy discs. (boot.img, cdrom.img, and root.img) I have no reason to use net.img (still get this image when I use it though)

'ls /dev/hd*' comes up with nothing.

Any help?

[onlinebacon]

mount /mnt/hda might be the command you are looking for.

[Mystic_Slayer]

why don´t you make a floppy to boot from. You can use your cdrom after using the bootfloppy

[TerminaMorte]

mount /mnt/hda might be the command you are looking for.

As I mentioned, dmesg doesn't show a hda (or hd anything). The hard drive is simply not detected (although an old 2.2.x linux floppy disc detects it, as does MS-Dos 6x).

It's hard to mount something that isn't there.

[TerminaMorte]

why don´t you make a floppy to boot from. You can use your cdrom after using the bootfloppy

Please read my post next time.

As I stated, I can only have the internal CD-rom drive or the floppy drive in at a time. The laptop only had one bay for this.

I can only have one or the other.

I *do* have a PCMCIA CD-Rom drive, as I also mentioned, but

This is a problem, since many boot discs do not recognize PCMCIA cd-rom drives.