>I think I mentioned this in another thread, /dev/hda3 (32MB) is an unused partition by default
> Instead of resizing the swap partition (which will get erased by an upgrade because the partition table gets rewritten)

Another possibility might be the boot sectors. I haven't looked at the empeg partition table yet, but most Linux configurations blow a whole (virtual) track (63 sectors) for the "boot sector", leaving 62 unused unallocated sectors at the beginning of the drive, just after the partition table. We could grab one or more of those without much fuss, I suspect (various MS-DOS drive-extenders like DiskManager and EZDrive do something like this).