I have two hard drives, 1TB and a 320 GB.

I've used Debian's installer before, but only on a computer that I didn't care about, and I let it use "Guided" and use the entire disk.

I used GPARTED on my main computer. I have a few partitions.

The first partition is for windows XP. It's a primary partition. The next partition is a logical/extended partition, which is vista. The third partition is a primary one, the rest of the drive, for data.
I took part of the last partition to make room for another primary partition, ext3, for debian.

I tried using "Guided" in hopes that it would recognise my ext3 and set it up on there. No such luck, it advised me to format the entire drive as ext3. I hit cancel and tried manual. I know enough about linux to know that "/" is the root filesystem. For the manual, I put the "mount point" as "/".

However, when I went to the later part of the installation, the installer complained that I had not set up a filesystem at all.

What flags do I set to my ext3 partition to be able to install debian to, without reformatting everything?

Go back through the manual installation. When you get to the screen in which you choose the partition for the / (root), look around for an option to set/select to also format the chosen partiton. It may have a default to NOT format the chosen partition.

It's been a while since I installed Debian. Memory fails me just how it was when I installed Deb.

Thanks bigrigdriver, that solved the problem.


The only other question is, how do I set a certain partition to boot from grub?

Do I just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst
copy and paste the windows partition (title, root, savedefault, etc) before debian's?

Are we safe in assuming you can now successfully boot into Debian?
If you have a menu.lst file you should have an entry for windows which is usually put there automatically by Grub. In your initial post you refer to two physical hard drives then mention having three partitions and creating a fourth partition. Are they all on the same drive? on both drives?

It's pretty difficult to guess at your setup without detailed partition information and the fact that you have the older OS (xp) on the primary partition and the newer (vista) on a logical partition complicates things, particularly since vista uses a completely different bootloader than xp. If vista is installed after xp, it should auto-detect it and boot but probably have its boot files in the xp partition although I'm not really sure about this as I've never used either.

Next step should be to log in to Debian as root and from a terminal enter the command: fdisk -l (lower case Letter L) and post that partition information here.