my main question is about the partition setup on my new T42. right now i have the windows partion and the secret ibm service partition. will resizing and creating a new partition to install slack on my drive with partition magic cause any damage to the ibm service partition? i ask since i know its not a "real" partition rather a segment at the end of the drive that is hidden. i also read about someone who resized, installed linux, and then tried to recover his windows partition but couldnt get into the ibm set up screen?

also, a less important question i have is about the slack 10 install. is there some kind of option to select 2.6.7 kernel/gcc 3.4.0 during install? i dont understand what they mean about it being in the /testing or how to go about doing an install with those.

p.s. - sorry if this is the wrong forum, i didnt want to make 2 seperate threads in laptop and slack install, so i compromised and made one here

I am research your same conflict. I have a T41, and it also has the IBM Predesktop Area on it. Since mine did not come with any recovery cds I want to do it right the first time. Here is a good link for other people that have had success. Let me know if/how you got a good dual boot going.

I have tried partition magic (pm), I went through the wizard in windows to resize and set up my partition, but upon reboot I get and Error 27: Cannot Lock Drive from pm. But as far as pm seeing the predesktop area, it does not. If you go into the bios and set the predesktop area to disable, and then boot into windows and take a look at pm, then you will see the predesktop area is about 3GB. The default setting is normal, which allows you to partition the drive, but hide the predesktop area from being touched. I have a 60Gb drive so pm sees it as a 57GB (roughtly). My predesktop area begins at sector 110,160,... (roughly) and when I attempted to repartition/resize the drive pm make my second partition end at sector 110,160,... So it should work, but I keep getting Error 27. If I can get past that, then I am golden. I hope I made everything clear, I am rushing to go to lunch.

-tank