well, in sarge i used qtparted to format the partition and make it ext3, but if i just run setup from the slackware disk it says that no partitions were found.. the problem is that the 2.4 kernel doesn't recognize sata drives, so even if it was already partitioned (which it is) it still won't recognize it. i need a way to get it to boot into a 2.6 kernel. with debian sarge i have to type linux26 becasue teh default is also 2.4, but it doesn't work in slackware...