What I'm trying today is to dual boot XP and Debian.

Sarge v 3.1r0 2.4.47 kernel
HP Pavillion ZT1195
512 Mb RAM

My Laptop has a 40 Gb internal drive which I've partitioned:

100 Mb=fat 16
100 Mb=ext3 /boot
Balance=NTFS

I have connected a 160 Gb USB IDE HDD drive, installed the base system and have it partitioned:

80 Gb=fat32
300 Mb=ext3 /
5 Gb=ext3 /usr
3 Gb=ext3 /var
1.5 Gb swap
500 Mb=ext3 /tmp
5 Gb=ext3 /usr/local
Balance= /home

The install went as planned, I placed Grub in the 1st sector of /boot
but of course I can't see Grub from boot.ini from windows.

This tutorial sort of does what I need:
Dual-Boot Linux and Windows 2000/Windows XP with GRUB HOWTO
url removed please google the above line

Since I can't get back into Debian, I'm unable to use this command to make "linux.bin" which he references as a needed file for boot.ini to see my /boot partition :
dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/mnt/floppy/linux.bin bs=512 count=1

I tried knoppix v. 3.9 but it runs the 2.6 kernel, and my lapper and USB problems under 2.6 prohibit it...mouse locks up.

I guess I'll try creating the bin file under knoppix 3.4 until I see a reply here.

tyia

Actually, I think (not sure) the windows boot loader cannot run linux.. what I did was setup grub on the main hard drive, and add an entry in /boot/grub/sources.list for windows.

So this worked with USB IDE HDD and linux on drive 2?

Does it make sense to have /boot partition on the internal laptop drive(2.4.27-2 kernel "has support for external usb drives and runs stable on my laptop") or is that an unneccesary step?