I have tried a seperate experiment with the boot partitions which as far as I can tell has seemed to work.
The installation of Debian however was an entirely different matter. Being armed with "Learning Debian GNU/Linux" published in 1999 was of dubious value. The installer presented me with a plethora of questions which I didn't understand, let alone know the answers to, still blundered on and succeded in getting a poor broken thing which it will be kinder to re-format. One problem being that my hardware seems to be too new for the version of X, perhaps I could have got round that but I sem to have borken it so that it won't let me log in as root on a console. Another try is in order, as I don't know what I did wrong I'll just have to blunder through until I get one I can mend after installation.