Tell us how grub fails?
I have no idea, it literally doesn't even load.
What errors are you getting. At what point. What are the disk called,
and labelled at this point.
At this point (assuming by disk you mean the HDD) which is simply coming up with the lable for the weston digital caviar green 500gb hdd, not much else.
Seems likely to me it is trying to install to the wrong partition, or
the wrong disk.
Not quite likely as I've been telling it to install to that specific HDD and it's been doing so as I can see the files there on a live disc.
I would skip dual boot (since it sounds like there is nothing important
on the laptop from what you've done so far) delete existing partitions
in the installer and give the whole disk to Debian and let it try its
best by itself.
The dual boot really isn't an issue as windows xp and debian would be on different HDDs, and this isn't a laptop it's a desktop that currently houses 3 seperate HDDs, and my reason behind the dual boot is I'm a PC gamer by choice, but honestly I don't really want to battle with wine to get things to run correctly when I have the space and capability (or should do) to run both OSes as I need them.
As to the whole disk being given to Debian it already is, as stated above the windows and Debian installs at on different HDDs, and yes I've tried debian on both of the free ones, as the remaining one contains my files and various other things I don't particually want to lose.
Also check for daft antivirus bios settings, but these usually give more
obvious errors.
Yeah if I hadn't had Ubuntu installed on here before all this started this might have been the issue.
As for anything else to be added, just tried installing Debian again even when booting on to the HDD it's on the bios doesn't seem be even detecting that it's bootable despite obviously it being capable of booting as proven by what it was previously running.
Steve.
