Install to disk w/school's NT present??

[kaynjay@igalaxy.net]

I'm fighting the system at my community college to get Debian installed on
five (of 20) lab computers which are maintained by the school's Info. Tech.
group.  Windows rules.  The lab computers are occasionally wiped clean and a
fresh image of NT installed off the LAN.  

I want to repartition the drives, put Linux in alongside NT, and boot to it
(most likely off a boot disk) when teaching a computational chemistry
course.

Does anyone have experience with a setup similar to this?  Am I being naive
about doing this?  Would there be problems with the disk wipe/image update
process?  (Disrupting the status-quo is the big issue here.)

Also, is there any issue about the root partition being more than a Gb in on
the IDE drive??  (The PC's are IBM-brand 133 or 166 pentiums, "fairly"
recent ...).  I was thinking about simply chopping off the back end of the
current, single partition.  (I don't know if NT has a defrag function,
though.)

Thanks for any help with this.

Kenward Vaughan
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kaynjay@igalaxy.net
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