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Why is Debian install so slow?

tdawg

tdawg

Platinum Member
Hi all,

I'm trying to install Debian 3.1 on an extra hard drive I have. I've downloaded the 180mb network install disk. I had it install all the way to 'installing GRUB' or whatever, but it just hung there trying to detect my windows xp install, so I just shut off my computer and went to bed. It was the third time I've tried installing this.

I do have a few hard drives in my computer. My two primary drives are Seagate 250gb SATA drives and I have one Maxtor 120gb ATA drive hooked up to a Promise IDE controller card. Lastly, I have a Western Digital 80gb ATA drive on the Primary IDE channel of my motherboard.

Any time it has to detect hard drives or search hard drives for something, it takes forever. It takes about 15 minutes to detect 'Linux ATA Disk' or whatever, 20-30 minutes to detect and setup partitioning, and like I said, it was taking forever to detect my windows installation.

The network configuration was quick, and when it's actually installing the system it's ridiculously quick.

Is there any way to make this procedure faster? Any way to do a lot of the parts manually? Does anybody have any suggestions on how to make this faster, or is this just how it's done?

I've read people saying to try ubuntu for an easier installation (yes I know it's a flavor of Debian, or Debian-based), but I also read that Debian itself offers many more 100% compatible packages through apt-get or aptitude than ubuntu does.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. The rest of my system spec should be available in my sig.

Thanks in advance,
Trevor
 
Sounds like it's not using ATA at all. Hence, extremely slow read/write speeds to the hdd. Is the SATA driver good or is it loading prior to install?
 
Noc: nope, no messages at all. does it use the nforce ide drivers by default? i'll try it with less hdds.

Moot: the writes to the hard drive are very quick, it's just the detection phases that are achingly slow.
 
Success! Well, kind of. 🙂 I removed my Promise IDE card along with the 2 non-essential HDD's and the install went blazingly fast. Very pleased. Only problem is that while GRUB installed, I didn't get a menu choice of OS's when I rebooted. So now I'm off to find that solution. 🙂

Thanks for the help.
 
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