Thank you Tom and David! I was being *completely* thrown off by the fact that there was the "root" directive and I thought that the "image" directive was root-relative!!
OK then, so at this point, I will try the band aids mentioned. But at this point I will probably scrape the disk and repartition since I finally decided to make "workaday" distribution and will need fewer partitions to play with. It all boils down to a partition for stable-Debian, test-Debian and "gee I'd like to look this distro over for yucks". -rick
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