When I was building my desktop, I had also bought 3 hard drives, with it. I didn't use the third hard drive, but I put Slackware on the master, and Windows 7 on the slave.

I now want to use this 3rd hard drive for testing out other Distros (I know for testing they probably don't need a whole hard drive). The main reason for this is because I actually couldn't find the partition manager (and I'm not 100% sure if it's "cfdisk" either so I didn't want to tamper).

The first distro I wanted to test out was Debian 7.0, and I've used 6.0 in the past but always came up with the problem of GRUB putting itself into the MBR by default. So I'm curious about 3 things:

1. How do I keep LILO in the MBR and not use GRUB at all, or prevent GRUB from being the first boot loader.

2. Is it possible to install certain programs from Slackware onto Debian (I doubt it since Debian packages are in .deb format, but just want to check ahead of time)?

3. Would I have to edit lilo.conf to add in Debian?

1) You can do one of two things: a) tell debian to put grub in the / partition during the install and then chainload it with lilo, or b) tell debian not to install a boot loader and just configure lilo.conf by hand with Debian's boot parameters. You may need to boot the installer into advanced mode or expert mode to get the different bootloader install options.

2) You can try using alien to convert the package to a *.deb. Or you can always build debian packages from source (or just compile from source and install it somewhere else like the /opt directory).

3) Yes. Either by adding lines to chainload the grub you installed in the Debian root partition or by adding the lines for directly booting the debian kernel.

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Thank you pljvaldez. ^^

1. Use the expert options when booting from the installer CD, you can choose to not install the bootloader or install it to the /-partition of Debian. I don't know if that is possible with a live-CD, so use the normal install-CD/DVD.
2. I wouldn't recommend that, since installing programs without the knowledge of the package manager is never a good idea in Debian and can lead to serious problems.
3. Of course, if you want it to start Debian.

EDIT: Man, too slow.

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It's fine, I'll see how it goes and report back. ^^