Installing from a temporarily connected CDROM drive worked (no internal optical drive in the DL140, just space for a slimline drive), but after I removed the drive and rebooted I got a “kernel panic” message. Seems like Grub didn’t enumerate the drives in the same way as when the CDROM was connected.

A known problem with the Debian installer also made installing from CD difficult – the CDROM drive and the SATA disc became mutually exclusive! The solution was NOT to load the ata_piix and piix modules until needed.

My next approach was PXE booting (installing from the network without physical install media) the machine. The easiest way to get that running was ironically to use a Windows-based TFTP server (tftpd32) and then configure the DHCP server (dnsmasq). Booting off PXE worked, but the install image didn’t seem to contain the required SATA drivers, so the installer never found the SATA drive.

I managed to do a successful install using kernel 2.4.27 instead of 2.6.8, but upgrading the kernel to 2.6.8 after installing made the system unbootable again (kernel panic). I wasn’t satisified with using 2.4 and decided to try another way that didn’t require a time-consuming (well, for me anyway!) manual kernel recompilation…

The final solution was to create a bootable USB stick with Debian installer on it and install from it… Using “expert26″ I disabled the piix modules and voilá – the installer found my SATA drive!