This just sounds weird to me. Managing disks and filesystems is done in the kernel; there is very little a *distribution* can do to screw up access at this level.
This is almost certainly a kernel problem. However, it is quite likely that different distros have their kernels configured differently.
A 250 GB drive has to be ATA-6. ATA-5 drives have a size limit of 120 GB or so because of the way sectors are addressed. ATA-6 increases the limit by addressing the sectors differently in such a way that more of them can be specified, and requires changes to the kernel. I'm not sure, but I could see that changes to the partition map might be required too, so you might need a later version of fdisk or what have you to support this.
However, looking through Configure.help in the kernel sources for 2.4.19 (the latest on my box) didn't reveal any mention of ATA-6. Maybe you need a 2.6 kernel. Try this while in the Documentation directory of your kernel sources:
grep -i ata-6 Configure.help grep -i ata6 Configure.help
This turns up matches of "ata66" which is a different thing, running the bus at 66 MHz.
If your knoppix cd has the .config file for the kernel it uses, compare that to the .config for the kernel in your debian installation. Debian copies the .config file to the /boot directory. Maybe you can find an option you need to enable.
Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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