I'm installing slackware tomorrow. Is this the correct process to install it?

1. Put the boot image I select on a floppy using RAWRITE

2. Copy color.gz onto a floppy for the root disk

3. Restart computer, put in boot disk for slackware.

4. Follow directions, wait until prompted to enter the root disk

5. Run fdisk that is [available when root disk runs] ?

6. Create two partitions, one for the root filesystem, and one for swap space

7. Quit fdisk, type in setup at shell prompt

8. Follow instructions

My questions:

1) Do I only need to make the boot disk and root disk?

2) I have windows on one hard drive right now, and am going to instally LILO in setup. When do I choose which hard drive to make my partitions on when I run fdisk?

3) Is fdisk automatically available at the point where I put in the root disk?

4) Are there any steps I missed or seems like I'm confused on?

5) I really need to make sure I don't delete any partitions on my 100 GB hard drive w/ windows on it. How do I differentiate between partitions on 1 hard drive, and partitions on the other (physical) hard drive?

6) I am dualing with XP and linux. Does the regular LILO installation work for this?

7) How do I choose what type of partition to make when running fdisk (NTFS, FAT, etc)

I am going to get through this, I know it!

Thanks a lot guys

OOH I almost forgot to ask! Lets say something goes wrong during installing, and I come back here for help. Do I just reboot like normal to get onto windows?

Steps 1 to 3 are redundant, just reboot your computer with the slackware-install cd and follow the prompts.

4. At the initial prompt login and select a kernel to boot, press F1 to see all the options.

5 & 6. If your installing to a second drive (primary slave) do "cfdisk /dev/hdb" and create your root and swap partitions (512mb for swap and the rest for root).

7. Yes.

8. Yes.

Your answers:

1) Only if you can't boot the install cd for some reason, if you computer is new enough to run XP then it will support booting from cdrom, you may need to set this option in the bios.

2) If the windows drive is on the Primary Master Controller it will be reported as /dev/hda, a secondary drive will be reported as /dev/hdb,
Primary Master = hda
Primary Slave = hdb
Secondary master = hdc
Secondary Slave = hdd

3) Both fdisk and cfdisk will be available, cfdisk is easier to use.

4) See above.

5) See above.

6)Yes.

7) You'll want to select a linux native filesystem, I would recomend either ext3 or reiserfs, I use reiserfs myself.

when do i select ext3?

also, i'm downloading the iso image of slackware. after i write this to a cd, i am able to boot off of it? must i have the purchased version of slackware for that or no?

also, i don't need to make any root diskette?

1) After you type "setup" you will eventually come to a screen where you can select and format your target partitions.

2) The download version is bootable, have a look at this page at linuxiso.org for instructions on how to burn bootable iso's.

3) Only if you can't boot the cd.

The second hard drive which I will be installing to is the F:. Currently Windows is installed on it, but we boot from our XP drive.

1) Do I need to defragment or format or delete any partitions before I start the installation? Of course I will delete partitions when I get to that step in the installation, but do I need to do anything similar prior to it?

2) I am positive I can boot from the CD-ROM drive. After I burn the ISO image, you're saying I don't need to create ANY diskettes?

Sorry, I just want to be totally sure

1) It's a good idea to defrag a windows partition is you intend to resize/move it, use of fdisk/cfdisk will destroy any data on windows partitions so you might want to back them up or move any data first.

2) If you can boot from cdrom than you don't need to make any boot floppies to install slackware.

This will be fine, however it will be a little tricky to boot up on it. Here are some choices

a) Use a boot floppy, It's ulgy and slow, but works.

b) You can also use your Slackware cdrom with a "bare.i root=/dev/hdb1 noinitrd ro" at the initial prompt to boot into the first partition of the second IDE drive. This is also clumsy.

c) Switch the boot order of your hard drives in your computer's BIOS. This works but you'll have to modify your lilo.conf file with a "disk /dev/hdb BIOS = 0x80" statement, otherwise lilo will get confused and try to find Linux on the XP disk that got swapped to the second drive. (Hint, if you install Linux with the drive already swapped, everything will work fine), Also if you just leave them swapped, you can configure lilo to give a boot option to get back into XP as swapped to the second disk. This is what I would do.

d) You can read the document (I can't remember where it is, you might need to "google" for it) about using the XP's boot loader that is on your first hard drive to load the Linux on the second. Do a search for "boot.ini Linux" and read about how to do it. I would also do this. That way you can get into either OS reguardless of which way you have the disks swapped around.

e) You could install lilo on your XP drive. I would NOT recommend this, unless you really know what you are doing, you can easily end up with neither OS booting from a hard drive! Also XP's utilitites are likely to eventually destroy the lilo bootloader on its drive anyway. The reason I mention it is so that you don't allow any of these Linux installer's autoconfig routines try to do this automatically. Beware of a "boot=/dev/hda" statement in the lilo.conf file unless you *do* have your disks swapped around! I once had Corel Linux do this to me.

No, the install procedure will allow you to identify, destroy, create partitions all you want.

If you want to save the old windows partition AND if it is an older FAT32 (not NTFS) you can use a free bootdisk from the "gparted" at http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/ that will non destructively resize it to make room for new Linux partitions.

Yes. Just burn it as you would any other ISO9660 image, and boot it.

Good luck, Slackware isn't too hard once you 1) find, and 2) read the documentation. You might want to read some of it before you start.
You can start with the "Slackware-HOWTO" that is on the root of the Slackware CDROM.