Thanks for the replies, the post was in frustation that the install was not doing what I wished and then failed. Telling someelse of a problem clears ones perspective in a wonderfull fashion though. The artical point out by Daniel explains __everything__ relatively clearly. Just to explain I always install Debian the same way, in expert mode. initialy only the base packages are installed and the system rebooted (if possible, I have had failures before here). I have never used "task select"! The next step depends on if it is new version of debian, in that case individual packages are selected using "dselect" after setting "install-recomends"and "install-sugests" to false (in apt.conf). I have a standard (rather odd) setup with regards to selected packages, this step usually takes around 3 to 4 hours. If the install is of an existing debian version, the package selections are transfered after the base install from one of my other systems using the method described in the handbook. Using this an entire personalised install can be acheived in way under an hour. I will consider my next step, I will do another base package install of 7.0.0 and install lilo by hand, I may though have two goes as the procedure is trivial and see of I can find out what went wrong with grub, it was installed, the relevent files all existed in /boot. Lindsay