installation scripts and MCA machines

[Nick Cleaton <njc@newton.npl.co.uk>]

I recently successfully installed debian 1.3.1 (.r3 I think) on an
IBM Model 55 386SX with 4Mb RAM (an MCA machine).

The diskset I was using was clearly not desgined to work with MCA
machines, so I was very impressed that it proved flexible enough
to allow me to get the system up, thank you :)

The biggest problem I had was that the installation scripts failed
to detect
          (A) the MCA hard disk (/dev/eda), and 
          (B) the partitions on it (/dev/eda[123]).

I fixed (A) by adding /dev/eda to the arguments of the invocation of
tryopen in the script, but (B) seemed to be a result of 'fdisk -l' 
failing to look for MCA disks, so I botched it by puting lines like
partitions="`echo /dev/eda2`"  in the script.

Life would have been easier if, when the script failed to find any hard 
disks or partitions of a particular type, there was an option to 
override the autodetection results and specify the name of the disk or 
partition to be used.

Thanks again for your excellent work

Nick Cleaton


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