I havea hard drive (SATA) which contains 4 distros already. I want to add Slackware to it. I have partitions already set up as ext3 and a swap partition.

The reason I am asking is that I tried to use fdisk to creat an extra partition to install Gentoo and it ended up wiping out all the partitions on the drive. Since I already have a partition which is formatted as ext3 but not given a mount point yet, do I really need to use fdisk at all or can I just skip the fdisk step and use the mount to define the root partition. I am planning on using the Ubuntu grub menu list to boot the computer since it seems to play well with others while some distros don't.

I am just very leery of using fdisk again since I have recreated the other distros 3 times in the past 2 weeks after using fdisk and that is getting very tiresome. It just seems as if I can use the mkdir and mount commands to set the function of the partition and the swapon command to activate the swap partition. I don't think I need to mount a boot partition since I will be chainloading the distro to the Grub set up in Ubuntu.

Am I crazy or does this make sense? I am just guessing as to how these things work and this makes sense to me.

You don't need to use fdisk again if you have all the partitions already set up right. Just install to the right partition.

Then if I just use the mount and mkdir commands to define the function, then I should be good to go ahead and install. Am I reading you right?

As long as you know which is the target partition just boot the install disc and start the install. The installer will ask you which partition you want and allow you to choose it from a list, and then ask if you want to format it and in what file system.

Thank you. I will get to work installing in the morning. Looking forward to this. I have just about given up on Gentoo because of the apparently buggy latest version but Slackware seems to be better planned.