I'm trying to install Debian on my formatted HDC (second HD) as a second OS, this is a "NETINST". The install wants to rewrite the partition table on both disks (HDA and HDC). My HDC is the same size as HDA and also formatted exactly the same, both disks have 13 partitions including a SWAP partition that the installer wants to use. HDC is only used as a backup of HDA data files.

Is there a way around this? Firstly I don't want HDA touched at all (installer wants to format its swap) and secondly I'd prefer to keep the non-system partitions intact on HDC. Since these were created by FC2, SWAP is hda2 and hdc2

Your suggestions greatly appreciated.

You should be able to do that install using only the partitions you choose to use. I'm not entirely sure I understand exactly what the problem is.

Hope my experience is helpful to someone.
I wanted to keep my FC2 on HDA and install Debian on HDC. My statement above that the install wanted to rewrite the partition table on both is incorrect but it wanted to format and use SWAP on HDA and I couldn't avoid this so I finally let it do that thinking I should be safe if it didn't rewrite the partition table on HDA.

I got the base system installed and it proceeded smoothly through the download (after the base system) for about 2 hours of the expected 4.5 hours then it started to give a lot of messages ".....Waiting for headers."
This went for about 15 minutes with long pauses between messages, then it started to add a second message "....28 no space left on device." Then I thought continuing would probably be a waste of time.

Was the first message some problem with the mirror?

After the base install, the reboot gave 2 options as expected, my old FC2 or Debian, I didn't try FC2 at the time. However when I stopped the download I was left with the only option to reboot with FC2, this proved impossible, I didn't even get to a stage where I would have an opportunity to repair if I knew what was broken.

Was this due to the fact I let the install use SWAP on HDA?

After trying for about 5 minutes I thought my only option was to reinstall FC2 but that didn't work either, it complained about space when at the stage of installing the "install image" (or similar). So I thought this install was affected by some corrupted data it was trying to use from the last FC2 install and I had to clean the disk somehow, so I installed an old Debian Woody I had on CDs. This worked but I found I didn't have access to my important directories that should have survived this mess and decided I should re-install FC2 just to make sure those directories and files were safe, this worked this time and my directories and files were safe.

I'm on a "no-limit 500MB" plan and most of, or more than that allocation has been used in my unsuccessful attempt at "NETINST", so theoretically I can still download but the speed will be reduced to a crawl, so I've just ordered Debian Sarge on CD, this should come within a few days.

I'm new to Debian and I would have one main question now, is there a better way to get help than using Google as this involves reading a lot of unrelated material just to find it's not what you're looking for? Searching for "Debian forum" gives very much the same result.

In case the disk space is important, I have 512MB for /, 4G for /usr, 5G for /var, 1G for /tmp and 1G for home (no boot partition) and the rest of the 80G disks divided for my main files. Space shouldn't be a problem.

Thank you very much for your help.