Bill:

1.5G Root ReiserFS

Hrm? Why would you want to do this? / doesn't normally meet your typical ResierFS performance profile and it's not going to be recoverable with most boot disks. That's just asking for trouble, IMO.

[...] I got the Woody boot disks and tried. Hmm. The kernel uses an old, forward-incompatible, version of ReiserFS.

Boot disks are normally what ends up holding up the releases, IIRC.

OK, install on the Win95 partition and worry about Reiser/LVM later. Nope.

Why not? (Wave a tasty problem in front of us and then don't explain.)

Can't use my 2.2 CDs. OK go over the modem. I've got a Xircom RealPort Ethernet/Modem combo, very nice, but Debian insists on using eth0 in preference to ppp0. [...]

Did you answer "yes" to the bit where it asks you if you want to install the rest of the system over a modem? ;-) Sadly, you need the base system somewhere local in 2.2, but that's probably healthy anyway, so you don't end up with a half-installed base system.

Downloading and compiling at work at the mo, but is there a *better* way???

Probably. I used my /home partition (which lives forever) for the base files, along with a couple of floppy disks and it went on fine here, but I've the positively bland "small ext2 root, large ext3 home, medium ext3 usr and var" configuration. I'm not that adventurous with my data ;-)