Just to let you know I have finally installed to HDD successfully. Now I have a dual boot sys with WinXP one one hdd and Linux on another. In case its of interest to others, this is what I did.

I re-formatted the second hdd with an 80GB ext3 partition and a 500MB Linux swap partition and installed Knoppix using the newbie option.

After checking out www.aboutdebian.com where there is a useful page on dual boot setup, I downloaded bootpart from www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm and ran it from WinXP. First running:

bootpart

produced a list of partitions. I was then able to run:

bootpart n bootsect.lnx Debian Linux (where n=the drive with Linux on)

After that, booting gave the option to select WinXP or Linux. At this stage, the Linux option resulted in a GRB prompt.

Booting again from the Knoppix CD I ran update-grub to create a menu.lst file thus:

su
mount /dev/hdg1 /mnt/hdg1 (this is obviously specific to my hardware)
chroot /mnt/hdg1
update-grub

And Bob's yer uncle - the system booted into Linux from the hdd at the next attempt. Phew! Thanks again for your help, folks.



At this stage