Hello. I usually don't need to come here for my problems, but this one my even stump you.

I have an IBM Thinkpad T30 with a 1.8GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4, 768MB PC-2100 DDR, 40GB internal, 120GB western digital external, onboard usb 1.1 and an ali chip based usb 2.0 pcmcia card so I can run at 480mb/s as opposed to 12.

The problem is, I never have used initrd images before, never had the need. I want to have the root and boot partitions on the internal drive, so the bios can boot the usb device. But here's the delima... assuming this device is supported under 2.6, which ali's are, it should work with any usb device. This is true, I bet you cold hard cash I could have linux on the main drive and mount the usb drive. But what about partial spanning say with /home /usr /opt /tmp /var on the external? The problem is getting the multiple device mess working. which I'd like some input on. Slackware's default installer 2.4 kernel doesn't support some strange usb configurations, and due to usb hd's being scsi'ish, you chose one or the other kernel, you'll lose a feature you need. The real questions here is, would slipstreaming a custom kernel into the slackware iso solve the problems, or am i missing something?

thanks.

Figured it out. Slackware's bootup for the installer on the cd doesnt have the required modules for scsi disk and usb storage, and hotplug would make it easier. I booted up the gentoo cd it worked... anywho. =/