Partition the Disk

The laptop came with a small (290MB) "free" partition at the front of the disk and the rest of the disk allocated to Windows ME. The small partition is for suspend to disk use.
Create the suspend to disk partitionBoot with the Windows ME boot disk, at the menu select Minimal Boot (option 4). At the DOS prompt A:> insert the suspend to disk floppy and run mks2d. (Note that there is another program called phdisk that should be used for other Inspiron models. The Dell knowledge base states that mks2d should be used for the Inspiron 8000.) (Note also that you should use rms2d to remove a previous suspend to disk partition if you've already created one and want to redo it.)
Make room for linuxWhile still at the A:> prompt, insert the Partition Magic floppy and run pqmagic. Now you'll see that the small free partition has been mostly taken up by a Type 84 partition (275MB). The remaining space is still free. I later installed Windows 2000 into the Windows ME partition, and it gobbled up the free space. You could use Partition Magic to add it to Windows now. In any case, shrink the Windows partition from its current 17GB to about 4GB, leaving the freed space unallocated.