After having much trouble with my laptop (me stuffing things up) I descided to convert my FS from Ext2 to Ext3. The upgrade was relatively painless following the instructions on "Using the ext3 filesystem in 2.4 kernels"

And as always thanks to John (who maintains this site) for pointing out that I hadn't specified the device. With out John's help I would still be a Windows weeny instead of a unself sufficient linux/debian user.