Well I'm back from my rather busy week-end (totally away from computers) and, after a few more clicks, the Suse 10.1 installation on my new hardware has completed.
However it does have on little oddity, when booted/rebooted it doesn't show anything on the display. It is working though as I assumed there was a login prompt and was able to login 'blind' as root and shut the system down. All the dmesg stuff appears it's just after that the display goes.
If I boot in Suse's "safe mode" the normal login: prompt appears and, in addition, I can log in and run startx to get X windows up.
So, it's all working pretty well really except for the default console mode. Does anyone have any ideas how to remedy that?