[SPARCbook] Sparcbook 3000XT Solaris 8 install doesn't see IDE drive - HELP!

[Jason King]

Ok, I appreciate all the help I got with the pcmcia cdrom question but now
have a new one related to the orignal reason I posted the previous message.
Instead of using the pcmcia Panasonic external cdrom w/ card, I bought a
cable and tried to reinstall the OS again.  Since I still ran into problem I
thought perhaps the cdrom is just bad and replaced it with a external sun
411 cdrom and set it to scsi id 6.  Now, I can "boot cdrom" and the Solaris
installer starts up and goes to the point that it wants to format and setup
partitions where it then can not find the ide hard drive and quits.  I tried
with Linux Mandrake, RedHat, Suse and NetBSD and all these OS's end with the
same problem of not recognizing any hard disks.  Does anyone have any ideas
on this problem?  Can I boot the machine, drop to a prompt and then mount
the cdrom and start the solaris installer that way?  I have tried to do it
this way with both the panasonic cdrom and the 411 cdrom and can't seem to
mount either, maybe it's in the syntax.  Can someone post a example to try?
Tadpole makes mention of this problem with single ide drives in thier
Ultrabook line but don't mention how to get around it.

Jason King