I am just installing Debian 3.1 r0 on the T30 Thinkpad. I have WinXP working on the first 29GB. I have an 8 GB FAT partition which is the D drive. But realise that it is Fedora Red Hat linux that can see and write to fat partitions. I am not sure about Debian. I am installing Debian into a 19GB partition. I have a 750MB swap partition. So basically today and Monday/Tuesday I have reinstalled all the operating systems on the T30. If I could replace the screen I would have the cool laptop system back in use. I may order a 256 MB RAM PC2100 chip for this laptop today at the school computer store.
I am copying my user account on the eMac and all the files and folders to my back up hard drive. This is about 10GB. I will perhaps wait a bit to make my DVD back ups. But this user account would be one thing to back up. Also I would back up to DVD, the My Documents folder from my windows machines.