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Setting up Debian



I'm a newbie to Debian, but an old computer hand... experiencing considerable difficulty in setting up a Debian Linux system on my DELL Pentium III 34gb drive
 
I set up a 8gb partition using fdisk and formated the lower 24gb with MS format. Then I used Partition Magic 5.0 to set up a 1,000mb root partition, "/", a 2gb /usr partition and a 1gb swap partition. I used Partition Magic to format each partition (root: Linux ex2; usr: Linux ex2; Swap partition: swap)
 
Then I made the Linux logical partition active with fdisk, went into the bios and set the CD as the primary drive and then rebooted a Debian 2.1 bootable CD-Rom which I bought in a package with an O'Reilly book.
 
Partition Magic is quite beautiful with its resources and I'm trying to avoid wiping out my W98 programs, but the Linux startup does not seem to recognize the partitions I've set up using PM, even after I reduced the size to just under 1gb, and does not seem to want to proceed unless I permit it to partition the system itself. The last time I allowed this, it wiped my disk clean and I spent the past few days rebuilding 6gb of programs
 
I understand from the FAQs that the root partition cannot exceed 1gb. Partition Magic claims to be taking care of the alignment
 
I've surfed the Debian web site, read the O'Reilly book ("Learning Debian Gnu/LINUX"), went out last night and bought another $100 in LINUX books (including the Red Hat Linux Bible and accompanying CD), and read the good documentation that comes with Partition Magic.
 
What am I missing? Would be grateful for help in getting up and running
 
David Turetsky

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