Partitioning advice
 

I'm running fdisk for the first time, and I'm not sure what parititions I should be making.

I've got a hard disk that's around 2 gig, and the other is 7-8 gig. Do I have room to get slack 8.1 and a swap partition on the smaller drive? what sizes do you recommend? any other partitions?

any advice or reference provided would be greatly helpful.

Full installation of slackware is about 2 gigs, so you want a partition more than that. Also, usually the swap is placed in the faster hard drive (I assume that your bigger hard drive is faster)

If you plan on having only Slackware, I'd go with 7/1 (swap), then 2 (storage)

I've got the larger drive set up as the slave... am I going to have to change that?

not really, but you might want to

You may think about a separate /home. It's a good idea, because you can change distros without loosing your files.
The size of installation depends on your machine. If it's P120, for example, there's no sense in installing KDE or GNOME (will be to slow). Then your installation will be smaller -maybe even less than 1GB.

I agree with Mara it also stops the system from becoming fragmented and makes programs load faster.

I've proceeded with two partitions on the larger drive (one of which being swap). I'll be storing files on the smaller drive, I suppose. I'm just sort of winging it because I really don't have a plan for how I'm going to use this system.