Using cfdisk on a working installation of Linux, I had set up
/dev/hda6 for the purposes of installing Debian. However, when I
booted
http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/sid_d-i/i386/pre-rc2/sarge-i386-netinst.iso
there appeared to be no way to install to it. The installer appeared
to want to zap the whole of my hard drive, which of course I wasn't
prepared to let it do.
When I got the section "Partition disks", I was presented with the
menu items:
1. Configure software RAID
2. Guided partitioning
3. Help on partitioning
4. IDE master (hda) - 41.2 GB IC35L040AVVN07-0
...
Selecting item 1