Quote Originally Posted by garrincha
O.k. Harry. I should have used the the Win98 boot floppy with fdisk. Anyway, that's in the past. So I had to remove the GRUB bootloader BEFORE I do the debian-etch installation?
That is a good question and I'm not sure of the answer to it. I would expect that Debian could install Etach to a system that already had grub in the disk's mbr and would just replace that grub with the new grub form this install, but I guess there is a very small chance that it could confuse Debian or at least bring up a question that I have never seen. I really don't know because as I mentioned I almost always use XOSL in the MBR (and XOSL has never confused Debian, it gladly over writes it if you let it). So unless I learn otherwise I think there is no need to remove grub, other than to get Windows back to it's normal Windows only boot mode.

Quote Originally Posted by garrincha
After about 30-40 mins, when the the installation was about 95% completed, I received the install failure message as described in the above post.
I'm not at all clear about what the problem you hit is. Perhaps someone who knows Debian better (I'm very much just starting to learn myself) will join in and provide some answers or at least ask the right questions.

Quote Originally Posted by garrincha
When I installed the Debian-Sarge CD, somehow the step where I choose the 'desktop install' didn't came up, otherwise the whole installation including GRUB install went o.k.
I take it then that you got far enough in the Etch install to see that desktop install question? I do know that the Sarge install dialog is different, they have made it much more user friendly in Etch, but I'm sure that the offer was made in some form in Sarge as well. If I remember correctly it was a list of things that you wanted and you checked of things you want or unselected things you did not, but I could be remembering a completely different Linux install there.