It depends on whether your /home dir is an independent
partition, or it is under root dir ("/").
1. If seperate partition:
a) Just ensure that you do not re-initialise this part-
ition during re-installation. Just mount it as an
"existing partition" without re-initialisation.
b) Your fstab need not be tinkered any further, except
for adding floppy, cd-rom, DOS partitions etc.
2. If /home is under "/" (root partition):
a) Though it is strongly advised that you should re-
initialise / and /usr, you may not be in a position
to do so since contents of /home will be lost.There
maybe other dirs under / which you want to preserve.
Just do a rm -rf on the directories that need to be
re- written and re-install over the old thing with-
out re-initialising or formatting the "/" (root)
partition.
b) I have successfully re-installed even seperate dis-
tros by above technique.I just delete the following
dirs and re-install:
/bin, /boot, /dev, /lib, /lost+found, /proc, /root,
/sbin, /tmp, /var
[I know it is a bad idea not to seperate things like
/lib, /var etc. in separate partitions, but my home
comp has four OSs and I do not have much luxuries on
this score]
Normally I move my /root dir (rather than delete) so
that my dot files and other configurations of root
can be re-used. I also save copies of important /etc
files like profile, fstab, wvdial.conf etc before
doing a re-installation.
My /usr is a seperate partition. I always store my
/usr/local subdir in another partition before doing
a re-initialisation/ format of /usr, and copy this
back later.
HTH
USM Bish
On Sun, Oct 01, 2000 at 02:13:08PM -0700, Dale Morris wrote:
> This is probably embarassingly simple, but I'd better ask.. I'm thinking
> of doing a reinstall of 2.2 and would like to use my existing /home
> directory. That will allow me to keep lots of existing info. I tried
> this once before w/ Redhat but it didn't work right after the reinstall.
> Do I just do a regular install *not* mounting the /home partition? After
> the install, how do I get the /home partion mounted? Can I just copy my
> /etc/fstab file and /home will mount automatically?
> thanks
>
