I have installed Sarge from NetInst. On reboot Grub gives error-18 and stops. This is supposed to be solved by creating a boot partition within the first 1023 cylinders of the hard-drive.

I've tried creating a partition called "/boot" during the install, but Debian won't install the kernal there. How do I get Grub to run?

Maybe you could give more information like how big your /boot partition is, and what is in grub's memu.lst file. You will probably need a bootable disk like Knoppix to get into your system without grub properly configured.

By the way, you do not have to have a separate /boot partition and it doesn't have to be at the beginning of the disk even if you do have one. I personally always install with just 3 partions: 1 mounted at "/" (around 10 GB), 1 swap partition (500 MB or so) and 1 mounted at "/home" (the rest of the available disk space). Have a separate /home partition allows you to re-install the OS without losing personal data. I haven't found the need to create a separate /boot partition.

The boot partition is 50Mb, but curiously doesn't have /boot, or much of anything else, in it. This in itself seems like a problem, but how do I get NetInst to load the kernal in the boot partition?

The next partition is mounted at /home and is 14.4Gb, after that is the swap area.

Menu.lst has:

default 0
timeout 5
color cyan/blue white/blue

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.4.27-1-386
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.27-1-386 root=/dev/hda2 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.4.27-1-386
savedefault
boot

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.4.27-1-386 (recovery mode)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.27-1-386 root=/dev/hda2 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.4.27-1-386
savedefault
boot

Dunno if this is at all related, but I'm just installing Sarge today using netinst D-I RC2 and it had a corrupted grub package. Had to use lilo.