The experiment was to install it with a separate /home partition on a second drive in the same machine. Prepared the /root and /home partitions with gparted and fired up the disk. There was no desktop install icon. Is there supposed to be one? No biggie to go to the menu. I used the latest installer from testing as you suggested. Chose the expert install. IIRC, the separate /home option is only available with the expert install. It took a few tries to tick all the correct boxes. Had to keep starting over because there wasn't a 'go back' option at every step. Maybe a feature to add? Had to stop and think about the /boot option and finally realized that was different from /root so didn't check it. My pre-formatted partitions were kept intact. YEA! Locale options were a little confusing too. But it did install and pretty quickly. Installed grub on sda1 (/root).
It finished, rebooted and I chose the install on sda1. Oops! It really didn't like that at ALL! Pushed the big button because I didn't understand what the console was asking of me and couldn't find a way to do anything useful from there. Where would I find the appropriate error logs? Next restart, booted into the original refracta install. Tweaked fstab, /media mount points and ran update-grub. That seemed to fix things. Next reboot, sda1 booted properly. That's where I am now!
Next project will be to install it on my production machine. That may be a while because I want to complete a seemingly never-ending video project before I change horses. Will probably unplug the other two drives in that machine just to make sure I don't do anything monumentally stupid.
I'm pretty Zen beginner's-mind with Linux. I kind of know what I'm doing (but not always why it works) and seem to be able to eventually sort things out intuitively by trial and error.
You guys have done a great job with these tools. For the most part very smooth. I take full responsibility for any confusion during the process.

One other thing which should maybe go in a separate thread . . . I tried to update yad before doing this and was getting pango dependencies that would break things. So I left yad as it was. Will probably have to sort that out before long.