RocketRaid 2300 / Debian Installation

[Agmemon]

Dear Community,

I need your help, installing Debian. At first, here is the configuration of the machine:

AMD Athlon 62X2 4200 AM2
Gigabyte GA-M55plus-S3G Mainboard
HighPoint RocketRAID 2300
DVD-Drive SATA, attached to the mainboard
2 SATA harddrives, hardware RAID1, attached to the rocketraid

I have to install Debian on this machine. At first, I tried the installation with the netinstall image debian-31r3-amd64-netinst.iso. But the DVD-Drive wasn't found. So i gave it a second try, using debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso (Etch), with kernel 2.6.17-2-amd64.

The installer found the dvd-drive, but the harddrive was not found. Even selecting the sata_mv driver.

The Controller was shipped with drivers for Fedora, RedHat and Suse (i386 and x86_64). On the HighPoint webpage I found the sources for an open source driver (i386 and x86_64).

How can I install Debian on this machine? Without a running system it would not be possible to compile the OpenSource driver, right? Is it possible to use x386_64 drivers for AMD64?

It would be greate, if someone can help me.

[Outdoor83]

Well, that's not exactly true. All you need are the Linux headers to compile this driver, and you can hack a compile together from a LiveCD if you do a little digging around. It's not the easiest way to get it working, but it's possible. Good luck.