well ran the installer again, and realised that there must have been a problem with the burn as i reburned the iso, and although it had the same problem as before running it from cd, at least the debian installer prompted for creation of the bootdisk this time.

and i must say, after 6 months of being on fedora core 1, debian kills it. seems less klunky and more stable, not to mention running quicker, even though fedora was starting to zip after kde 3.2 and kernel 2.6.

thanks for everyones input.