Thank you very much for your reply. I think I will post
a restatement of the question. I would have thought that
a dual boot of windows 7 and debian would be a common
enough problem that there should be something about it
somewhere, perhaps in the installer instructions.
1) Make your Linux partition an "everything" partition (root, boot,
usr, var, home, and so on...), in Primary slot #4.
Just to get more detail on how this would work:
I would create a primary partition using all the available
free space, described as / and bootable? This would work
even though there isn't swap space?
I must admit I'm afraid to tinker with the windows section,
so that your other idea of backing up one of the windows partitions
(don't even know how I would do that) and doing things so I
have only two primary winows partitions and
have one primary debian partiton for / (bootable) and one extended
partion for swap, /home, etc. Actually I must be misunderstanding
your idea, since I think swap is somehow incompatible type from /,
/home, etc.