krraleigh

I am new to Debian/Linux and I would like to use it to learn how to develop sites using PHP--something that I have been doing for about a year now--.
Anyway I bought the Debian OS DVD after thoughly reading the documentation from a site and installed it using the defaults, "I have a partition for each item, root/ usr/ var/ home/ etc..." I also installed the desktop. The installation went very smooth and the last step was for Debian to find my vista installation. It did, so I went ahead and installed the Grub bootloader as instructed by the tech docs that stated to only load the Grub if it found my other OS.

Trouble begins here.
I rebooted the machine and received a notice stating that no os could be found. I tried to repair windows to no avail. So I reinstalled it, and once again I am back on line. I only have the one machine, and I am running two disks, one for windows vista and one for Debian.

So my question is how do I dual boot windows vista and debian?
The grub bootloader obviously failed, why I don't know.

Also how do I backup the vista OS so that if it fails again I can repair it using the Vista DVD? There were repair options on the disk that I didn't know how to use, and I didn't setup the options for repairs so I wouldn't have been able to use them anyway.

I have spent the morning searching the web for answers and came up empty.

any insight would be greatly appreciated
thank you
Kevin