debiansatainstallp2

Installing Debian Sarge on a Sata Drive (page 2)

If you followed the directions on page 1 of this article, you should now have a functional installation of Debian on your hard drive. I have always preferred KDE as my default desktop GUI, so the following assumes that KDE is being used.

Post Installation Issues

Problem 1: The IDE hard drives and cdrom are no longer recognized. ²

Follow the suggestion to add the IDE drivers to /etc/mkinitrd/modules:

ide-generic
ata_piix
sd_mod

Then make a new initrd.img;

Backup your old initrd:
    #cp /boot/initrd.img.2.6.11-1-k7 /boot/initrd.img.2.6.11-1-k7.bak

Make new initrd image:
    #mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd.img.2.6.11-1-k7

You may have noticed, that you get some error messages. I ignored them and rebooted the system. No problems were noted with the reboot and my IDE drives were now visable with the command fdisk -l.

Problem 2: No sound.

You probably get the message when KDE loads, that /dev/dsp is not available when logged in as normal user. This is caused by the default permissions for the dsp device being set as root user. To fix this, get into kuser (start-->System--> User Manager) and add yourself to the audio group. Then open the File Manager as superuser and navigate to the /etc/dep file, right click on it and choose properties-->permissions. For the user, type in your user id and under group, type in audio. Log out of Debian to the Gnome welcome screen and log back into the GUI. Your sound should now be working.

Problem 3: The scanner does not work.

Same issue as in problem #2 with permissions. With my USB scanner, xsane uses a scsi interface to detect the scanner. If you type in dmesg in a terminal window, you will see some data for the scanner. So, it is recognized but not functional yet. The package xsane is the answer. As root user;

    #apt-get install xsane

This should install the necessary libraries and programs to get the scanner working. Once the packages are finished installing, get to a terminal as root user and type;

    #sane-find-scanner

If you are lucky, you will get the following output identifying the scanner.

# sane-find-scanner will now attempt to detect your scanner. If the
# result is different from what you expected, first make sure your
# scanner is powered up and properly connected to your computer.

found SCSI scanner " Scanner 600A4 1.23" at /dev/sg1
# Your SCSI scanner was detected. It may or may not be supported by SANE. Try
# scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage.

found USB scanner (vendor=0x05da, product=0x009a) at libusb:002:005
# Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be supported by
# SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage.

So, my scanner is at /device/sg1. Change the permissions on this file (using the File manager as superuser) to user = root and group = scanner. make sure that you have permissions (as user) to access the scanner group, by checking your profile in kuser (as noted above).

Check this by launching xsane from the command line (not as root user), or by navigating to start-->Graphics-->xsane from KDE.

References:

1. Install debian to ICH5/R's SATA disk

2. No DVD/DVDRW recognized in Debian testing...