I'm starting out with
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ The first step, of course, is to partition your drive. The only boot disks I can find are either booting to install a package (like Red Hat), and it only partitions as you install the package... the other boot disks just boot off the kernal located on the HD. Knoppix doesn't seem to boot off this (older) computer.
What's the easiest way to setup a boot disk (without having linux already installed on my "patient") where I can just drop to console and run some partitioning software (like fdisk or disk druid)?