hi, I solved the problem with INIT, thanks to Miquel van Smoorenburg, and I reinstalled, this time taking his advice on what partitions I should have. In total, I have about 2 gigs for linux, and I split it up as follows. BTW my machine is a standalone pc. :
/ 50 mb /usr 500mb /var 500mb swap 64mb /home c. 900mb My problem this time comes after the base system has been installed and the machine has been rebooted, and dselect is used to install the packages chosen by me (I chose the custom option, and picked all components for X, admin stuff, most of the developement stuff, the web things, games....). While dselect was unpacking everthing, every so often I would see an error message whizz by. I didn't quite see what these messages said, but it was something about 'no room left on block device'. This made me think that maybe some one of my partitions was too small (/usr?) but I doubt it - they seem pretty large. Finally, dselect stopped installing stuff. It exited with 'error status 1' and a message to the effect that installation had been stopped because there had been too many errors. Pressing return as prompted I was returned too the dselect menu of options. I chose configure, but this also would not operate becuase of too many errors. I then quit dselect. As I said in my last mail, I installed debian succesfully already on this machine with the same cd (only 2 partitions last time though - one for swap) any help appreciated, Brian Sheehan
