I've never dual booted before so I don't really know how to =P I want to dual boot xp and slackware but I don't want to mess myself up so if anyone could give me a link to a guide or something I would really appreciate it. I've looked around but I can't seem to find any site that tells me what I need to know. Thanks for your time!

first install win. then install Slack.
when you install "lilo", do that in the mbr ( choose expert-mode to do that. )
you will get prompted to add the winOS.

that's it.

egag

Do you want to shrink an existing Windows XP installation, then install Slackware in the freed up space, or are you planning on reinstalling both Windows XP and Slackware from scratch?

Similar question here.

Hard drive is split into two partitions, Windows XP is installed. I have like 6GB in the second of those partitions that I can spare.

Want to install Slack10 with dual boot.

Help please . Thanks.

Just proceed with the Slackware installation as normal, and make sure that you choose expert mode when it comes time to configure/install LILO. It is pretty self-explanatory. There is an option right there in the configuration menu to and a Windows installation to the LILO boot menu. Just pick that, select the partition that it is on, and bam, you're done!

My main problem are partitions.
Is it necessary to take space out of that 2nd partion? How?
Thanks.

What is on that second partition? If it is nothing you care to keep, you can use that partition without messing up your WinXP installation. Just boot from your Slackware CD and after it finishes loading and you get a command prompt, type in 'fdisk /dev/hda' and that will start the fdisk program on your main HDD. Just change the type of your second partition (should be labeled hda2) to Linux. These Slackware doc has instructions for doing this. After you finish with that, just start the setup program and select hda2 as the partition you want to install to (should be the only one available for the Slackware install) and when it asks if you want to format it, choose yes. Don't panic, it's not going to touch your WinXP partition. This will just build the needed Linux filesystem on the second partition.

[Edit]It shouldn't be necessary, but if you want to resize your partitions without hosing your WinXP, you can do it with any number of utilities off of the web. I used PartitionMagic. I can't remember if this was free or not though.[Edit]

if that partition is empty, just use " fdisk " to remove it.
then make a new one ( 2x memory size ) for swap ( id=82) and the rest for linux ( id=83).

egag

Quote:

[Edit]It shouldn't be necessary, but if you want to resize your partitions without hosing your WinXP, you can do it with any number of utilities off of the web. I used PartitionMagic. I can't remember if this was free or not though.[Edit]

Need the stuff that's on the second partition, but can spare some space it has. I'll get a copy of Partition Magic.

Thanks.

Well I have Partition Magic 8 now. Any tips? Thanks.

You can use it to resize your partitions without destroying data. Since you want to keep the data on the second partition, you could use PM to take the free space from that partition and make a new one. You can even resize them afterwards if you feel you need to. It is also good to have another partition for swap space, usually double the size of your RAM (i.e., if you have 512MB RAM, make a swap partition of 1024MB).