Comment by the_grue

I went that route on a school PC in 1998. There was no floppy drive, so I installed a Linux distro (also Slackware, iirc) onto the Windows partition, then resized the Windows partition with Partition Magic and used the existing Linux as a bootstrap for a fresh install on its own partition. It was so incredibly magical. No one had any idea I was doing it, and I felt part of the hacker culture :) I tinkered with it for a few of months at least, and eventually was compiling my own kernels, playing with boot/swap partitions, etc. Never got X to work, though.