I'm getting a netbook with no cd/dvd drive but it boots off of usb, so I've made a slackware 13 usb stick to start the install. I also have a usb hard drive I was going to copy the packages to. I'm wondering... should I boot with the usb install stick and then connect the usb hard drive afterwards?

That's my guess. Just to be lazy I'd likely first try booting from the stick with the drive connected to see if it'd work.

Let us know how it works for you. Cheers!

I'm running slackware 13 (32bit) on my netbook, since slack13 got first released. I 'm booting directly from my external usb drive (ext4). Few minor things to consider after installation is to mkinitrd and add the modules you need to pre-load
worked fine for my external disk (sdb1)Then you need to run lilo.
here is part of my lilo.conf
Be careful not to mesh up with your primary (internal) hard-disk (in my case sda). You don't want lilo to be installed there, otherwise you cannot boot at all if your external disk is not present. This is not a step by step guide, but I hope you got the main idea. Good luck

Not really what I meant, I was going to use the ext. usb drive to hold the install media. But... I like your way better, iff your ext. usb drive isn't connected can you boot into windows as if linux was never installed? Any particular reason you chose ext4 for your file system?

Yes, that's the idea. With the ext. drive plugged in, you can select the OS from lilo, if it is removed windows starts without any prompt.
I 've formatted in ext4 just because it's new I 'd like to try it. ext3 makes no difference , you can use it