Best way to prepare a win7 or xp drive for slackware install
 

I've used slackware since version 7 and installed various versions on both desktops and notebooks, some dual boots, some with separate hard disks. But it has been about 9 years since I created a dual boot system.
Back then I used partition magic to partition the disk on my laptop, and used a floppy with lilo to load linux.

I am contemplating buying a new laptop with win7 preloaded and would like to know the best options to use the disk management function in windows 7 to partition the one disk and install slack on the other half of the disk. should i make the empty partition dynamic, virtual, extended...?

Will Slackware care that I created the empty partition with a drive letter? The slackware install will let me fdisk the empty space with swap space and native.

My other option would be to buy a laptop without an operating system. Use the slackware install disk to fdisk the drive > install my own copy of windoze7 or xp > install slack > use lilo to load linux or windows.

If I am getting completely off base please let me know.

TIA for any guidance.

Bill

If you buy a computer with Windows 7, all you need to do is shrink the "C:" partition (in Disk Management in Windows 7). Boot from the Slackware DVD and use fdisk/cfdisk to create (a) new partition(s) in the available space.

If you create a partition in Windows, it will have the wrong partition ID (which is no big deal, but may confuse Windows later). If you format it and assign a drive letter, it will also have the wrong file system and will need to be reformatted by the Slackware installer anyway.

Don't do anything like that. Converting the disk to be dynamical will cause Linux to not see any partition on it. As Ser Olmy already stated, just shrink the partition and do the rest with (c)fdisk.

Use the Windows partition manager to create a Windows partition of the desired size, then install Windows and after that install Slackware, creating the needed partitions with (c)fdisk. From my experience Windows, especially XP, has problems during the install when Linux partitions are present on the same disk.

All modern partitioning tools start the first partition at sector 2048. From what I can tell, the XP boot sector won't even consider booting from the first partition unless it starts at sector 63.

Not even reinstalling the entire OS works unless you also repartition with an XP-friendly tool. I've tried.

Thank You Ser and Tobi!

Posted my question, ate dinner, found answer.

Going to mark this thread as solved.

Your responses were very clear and made me realize I was making
this issue more difficult than it needed to be.

I.O.W. I was thinking about it more than I had to.

Thank You Again.

Bill