a question on grub/windows and one on woody upgrade

[andrej hocevar <ah@siol.net>]

1)
I have to install windows on my computer and I don't want to change
more than is really needed to do so (especially concerning my disk
organisation). But the problem is that windows want to be installed
only on the first partition of the first disk which I don't want to
give away. Here comes the grub part -- the manual says it can hide
partitions and virtually swap disks. Is this of any use here? I
understand how this can help once windows are already installed --
but how to install them on the second partition? Can grub boot from a cd?
Of course, I can change my scheme with parted, no problem; but do I
really have to?

2) 
On a computer with potato, I get the following error when trying to
do an upgrade -- "could not configure a pre-depend" or similar. (I
got the three isos from the address posted here not long ago.)
However, if I try to install it from scratch, every now and then the
message "neighbour table overflow" appears on the screen, otherwise 
it runs ok.
Any ideas? On my computer woody runs perfectly and smoothly and it
was an install from potato (base only) and then at once pointing the
program to a debian's ftp-mirror.

Thanks, 

Andrej