I just bought a new laptop with the following specs:

Right now I have only one of the 100GB hard drives installed in it. If I want to install the second hard drive I need to remove the DVD burner and slide the second hard drive bracket in. The second hard drive is currently empty, but formatted as NTFS

WinXP Pro is installed on the first hard drive, and takes up the entire 100GB, formatted as NTFS.

I'm curious as to what my options are with regards to dual booting between WinXP and Slackware. Could I install WinXP and Slackware on the first drive, and then split the second drive between XP and Slackware as well? Would I be able to plug the second drive in, boot into Slackware, and then mount the Linux partitions on the second drive; or slide the DVD burner back in and mount that?

Also, it's been a while since I last installed Slackware and partitioned a drive. Can I use cfdisk to resize my WinXP partition? Or do I need something like Partition Magic to do that?

you can easy resize your windows partition
What is important is that space to be repartitioned is empty of data

Depending on what you prefer you can use qparted or gprted (both gui to parted)

Choose a distro live (like knoppix or slax)
Enter in windows and defrag
Boot your live distro
Do your repartition work, srinking the windows partition
Create at least 2 new partition, one for linux, the other for swap (take in consideration to do at least one more partition for home)
Reboot with slackware installation disk, and install in the new partition

The slackware install program will install lilo with an option ready to start windows or linux

well first since it looks like its been a while since you used slackware
so if u'r more comfortable with windows then I suggest you resize the first disk with somethig like Partition Magic and install both slackware on the newly created Partition and you can keep the second disk on ntfs since your linux will also support windows partitions but your windows won't support the linux ones(You might use third party drivers to incorporate support for linux filesystems on windows but they have been found to create problems now and then so thats probably not a very good idea)!!

jspaceman,

Try the sata.i kernel first and if you have problems with cfdisk'ing the drive (cdisk can't recognise /dev/sda and only sees /dev/hda) go with the 2.6 kernel. I need to do this on a desktop with SATA drives.

Dennisk

I partitioned the first hard drive and created an NTFS partition of about 55GB, a FAT32 partition of about 10GB, and the rest went to Linux. However, I can't seem to see the FAT32 partition from WinXP. I can only see it in Slackware.

Also, I can't seem to get a mouse working in Slackware once I start KDE. Both the Elantech touchpad and my MS Explorer Optical USB mouse don't work. I tried changing the mouse drivers around in xorg.conf (I tried PS/2, IMPS/2, among others) but nothing seemed to work. Which is weird because the touchpad mouse worked when I used the Gparted Live CD to partition my hard drive. And the MS Explorer mouse works fine on my desktop Slackware system, using the IMPS/2 driver.

Finally, my ethernet port didn't work at first (it's a RealTek 8169 Gigabit ethernet controller), but I went to RealTek's site and downloaded their linux driver and then did a 'modprobe r1000' and that seemed to work. Although I think I made a mistake by putting the line '/sbin/modprobe r1000' in my rc.local file because now Slackware won't boot. During the boot up process it seems to get as far as the module loading part and then the screen goes blank.

Are you using the default 2.4 kernel, or a 2.6 kernel?

With a laptop as new as yours, a lot of fixes, new drivers, etc for the hardware are likely still going into the latest 2.6 series.

Did you create the FAT32 partition from inside Windows, or Linux? Apparently it doesn't always work in Windows if it was created in Linux. Can you see the partition in Windows Disk Management? It may just be a question of creating a drive letter/mount point for it.

also if your mouse isn't being picked up make sure hotplug is enabled during boot

Once you have the netcard module installed, hotplug should load it automatically during startup
If not could be listed in the blacklist file that you can find in /etc/hotplug

for the mouse, check in your /dev directory if exist any device pointing to your mouse (here a link to /dev/psaux)