ok, i took my 40GB drive out of my desktop b/c my friend gave me an external hd mount. I have slack on my laptop harddrive and want to install windows on my external drive. the problem is, my toshiba restore disk automatically looks at the main drive and erases all partitions. so i'm thinking of installing windows on my main drive and slack on my external but i can't get slack to read my external drive during setup.

any suggestions? the only thing i can think of is getting a full copy of windows xp rather than a restore disk b/c the full copy lets you choose drives.

What is the external drive connection mode, usb or firewire ?

sorry, it is USB.

Maybe the more simple solution is to do your "toshiba restore", than when your windows is installed, reduce main partition size with an partition utility (under windows like 'partition magic' or 'parted' from a linux rescue/boot cd) .
You will have free space in your main drive, you can make 2 primary partitions, one for slackware root and another to contain logical partitions (for swap, another mount points...). I know reduce partition size is dangereous but it can works well by luck.

heh, i thought about that and seems like the best way to go but i just wanted to check the possibility or rather feasibility of it. thanks for the help