WOW, upon reading the English version it seems that I've actually been doing everything right (at least for the last week or so) after gleaning what I could from common words and other stuff not specific to the foreign language in my old manual.
So, it seems that either my partitions have been too large (success came running smaller 60mb partition (but a 40mb didn't work on a real HDD)), or my drives are too new and not suitable (more likely).
Have still only managed to get it working using one particular 128mb CF card partitioned into two halves & to date no other real HDD or CF card has worked...so I still need to figure out why...hmm?
PZ.