Going to have to reinstall WinXP

[Ergot]

No. I made one, but never used it. Disc 2 acts like a boot disk, I guess..

[deadly7]

hohoho yes. I can skip that part of the manual!

[Quik]

There's a very complex manual, including steps that you probably won't want to take, and some things that you'll want to do differently, but it includes pictures and instruction and I suggest reading over it before your first install. It's more of a learning experiance than a stick-to-the-book guide.

http://www.bitbenderforums.com/vb22/showthread.php?postid=311808

[deadly7]

Jesus, that thing's like a book.

[iago]

LoRD is referring to "man pages", which is a manual for each command.  "man ls", "man mount", "man man", "man filesystem", etc.  There's a manpage for just about everything. 

If your computer will boot off of a cd, you don't need a bootdisk. 

[deadly7]

Oh, on the subject of Windows for a sec:

What would you recommend I use to scrub my drive to remove Windows?
edit: keep in mind my computer doesn't boot past the BIOS.

[iago]

Can you boot Linux? 

for i in 1 2 3; do
      cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hda;
done;

[deadly7]

Yeah, I can boot Linux just fine.. My slackware 10 cd's boot just fine.

[Warrior]

If you can boot into slack, run cfdisk, and if that fails run "fdisk /dev/hda" (Assuming that's your HD)
Once in there simple type m for a list of commands and you'll see the command to delete a partiton, delete 1-howevermanyyouhave and type I think "W" to write then "Q" to exit.

Once that's done go into cfdisk and it should work now and make the partitions you want (Remember makesure one type is Linux and another type is Linux Swap (Swap is type 82))

Now once that is done go to write and write to the partition table then exit.

You may now (unless setup tells you to restart), run slackware installation.

Start at the screen to setup swap and everything else is for the most part automated.
When you come to the screen to format your HD choose ext2 (or if you want, ext3). I've had some bad history with ReiserFS so I wouldn't recommend it (IMHO). Now after your drive is formatted it should try to automount (hopefully it will work, if not run the steps again and choose manually mount it).

NOW, you are at the package screen. All of Linux and it's programs are availible in packages. You're going to want a lot of them, probably all of them.

Once you are done selection you can hit Expert, or any of the other options to choose which PROGRAMS inside the package you want (nifty eh?). After that you should have a full install.

Now, after the install is done it should automaticly run the things like searching for a modem, setting screen fonts, setting up network, etc.. which may be different issues we can fix here but nothing should go wrong. You will I think in the end get a LILO (LInux LOader) screen. This is what boots Linux. LILO (iirc) follows the Multiboot standard (also used by GNU GRUB) which means that after you install Windows, you can run "liloconfig" again and reinstall Lilo with Windows installed.

Now, LILO may fail on install and if it does, install it on the MBR (I don't think this is bad since afaik if you ever decide to install Windows alone and it (or it may be the linux partitions not being present) uninstalls LILO)

After that a simple "reboot" will reboot your system. Popout the CD and hope to hell it boots into LILO (red screen

(Note: I did not explain using the second CD to grab KDE, Gnome, and other things).

Happy to help,
Nelson

PS: Any corrections or improvements are welcome.

[deadly7]

I'm not installing Windows anymore.
But thanks, I'll try it out.. And hopefully I don't kill my hard drive.

[deadly7]

Ok, "cfdisk" is just to delete partitions, right?
"fdisk" is to write partitions, right?

I did research these commands, just didn't get themt oo much.

[iago]

They can both do both. 

cfdisk stands for "fdisk with curses".  "Curses" is a console-based user interface that you see.  You can partition your harddrive with either, but cfdisk is by far easier. 

And if all else fails, as always, "man cfdisk" and "man fdisk" should help

[deadly7]

I still don't get how to use CFDISK, really.
Would I use "bootable" or "write" to make a new partition?

[iago]

Try using "Create new partition". 

Delete one or more of the current ones.  I suggest all of them.  Then move the selection over the "Free Space", and choose "Create new partition".  Once you're done creating them, hit "Write", then "Exit".  Bootable is meaningless if you're using Linux's boot loader,which I assume you are. 

[RoMi]

What about the swap space iago?