der.hans wrote:
> Move all the data to a partition that won't get touched.
 > Don't let the installs touch that partition.

Right.  It's the "Don't let the installs touch ..." part that
I was asking about.  If the installers ask what partitions
they may use, then I'm fine.

> Look at parted if you don't have any unpartitioned space
 > on the disk and need to created a new partition.

You betcha!  Parted really saved my bacon when I had to
rearrange my entire dual-boot system (RH8 + Win98).
I was able to create new partitions, including FAT32,
move partition boundaries, etc.  All this was part of
recovering from one of my Win98 partitions going bad
and bringing in a new hard disk.  Parted is really great.

This was after I was badly burned by Partition Magic,
then again by Win98's FDISK which mis-labels your
partitions with DOS drive letters instead of numbers ...
fortunately I had backed up the contents of the clobbered
Linux partition to another location.

Thanks,

Vic