[NCLUG] help

[dmiles]

Ok, this is going to be rather involved. I'm a mid-grade linux user and I'm up 
agianst something I've never heard of before so the explanation might take 
some time but I would *really* appreciate some help if somebody can offer.

Basically my problem is that the installer says it can't find /dev/hda or 
/dev/hdb (both of which have hard drives on them that the bios reads just 
fine) but I should give all the information:

A few days ago I booted up my machine and the BIOS told me that I had a 
S.M.A.R.T error on "pri hard drive" and that I could back it up and replace.

So, I shut down the machine and hopped out to buy another HD intending to 
install a new debian system on that hard drive then reconnect the failing 
drive and retrieve my data.

So I set about installing the system. I put on a large ext3 partition, a 
pretty good swap partition and a fat32 partition (so that I can install 
winblows and play games) and proceded to install debian to the new disk. I 
hooked up the old disk intending to copy over my data and everything was going 
as planned when I started getting a *lot* of read-write errors on the new disk 
and it wouldn't accept any new data.

Now, feeling frustrated about this, I simply went ahead and installed windows 
as I had planned and that went fine, the windows instalation works as well as 
windows does and has no disk problems.

After this, I put in my linux boot disk to go into rescue mode and reinstate 
the LILO record but it claims that it can't find /dev/hda or /dev/hdb (file or 
folder does not exist) and fdisk says it couldn't open them. When I try to 
reinstall, it says that the disk geometry is different than the kernel 
expected and that I should specify it on the command line before I boot. This 
strikes me as an extension of that problem.

What did I do wrong? How do I fix it?