I have a HP Pavilion 3266, purchased new in 1998. I have a pentium mmx 233 mhz, accelerator chip of 400mhz and I recently installed a 30 gb in place of the original 2.1gb hardrive.
I currently have windows 95/98se on the first partition and I have redhat 7.0 on a second partition (partitioned using fips). The redhat is divided into a 16 mb /boot file, a 512 /swap file and approximately 22 gb / file. The windows file is 7 gb as I ran into 1024 cylinder problems booting redhat from the second partition if i went larger than 7gb on the windows partition.

Can I install Slackware 8.1 over the redhat without repartitioning?

Can I install Slackware 8.1 from the cdrom without making a 3.5" bootdisk?

Just put the Slackware cdrom in turn on the computer and it'll boot? Is this correct?

yes, yes, and maybe (if your bios is set to boot from the cdrom)

My bios will boot from the cdrom, if it doesn't sense a floppy it'll go right to the cd but another question is what about the files on redhat? Will slackware use the redhat /boot file? And the redhat /swap file and the 22 gb /?

Looks like your will it boot question got answered so here is the partition info based on when I installed Slackware over a RH install:

Slack will use the swap partition no prob, it should detect it during the install and use it. As for the other partitions Slackware can use those too, you have to tell it to though because it doesn't do a lot of hand holding and it will overwrite your RH install that way which I'm guessing you want to do. It's not too hard to figure out though, Slack will ask what to use for root (/) and list the linux partitions it sees, just pick the bigger one. Then it will notice you have other linux partitions and ask if you want to use them, now pick the small one and manually type in /boot when it asks what to call it.

you want to keep the redhat stuff or just reuse the partitions for slack?

ooh cool someone else is installing slackware over the red hat installations. i have the same exact questions. i booted from the slackware cd i figured since i already had red hat installed i wouldn't need to repartition. i was hoping to just use the existing partitions. well its not detecting them in setup. i am using a promise adapter card though, should i try one of the alternative kernels to boot from. i have tried the scsi kernels with no luck. i know I'm not using a scsi but my bios recognizes it as a scsi. any suggestions.

thanks ,
AD

Rshaw, yeah I just want to install Slackware over the redhat. I was just wondering as I don't want to go through another reformat and partition.

Ooh, one last item. Do I put the lilo in the Master boot record with slackware? With Redhat that's where it is now and appears to work fine.