Hi

If I make a copy of everything in the "/" directory (all files and folders), re-install openSuse and then copy that back-up back to my hard disc, will that give me exactly the same system as I had before?

I'm asking as I may need to change my hard disc partitions and re-install openSuse. I want openSuse to be as it was before making the partition adjustments.

Copying everything in / is largely redundant with re-installing. Why not just copy the key configuration files?---e.g. everything in your home directory, plus the contents of /etc.

You could also consider re-sizing the existing partitions and/or cloning the installation using dd.

If you will post the current configuration--including the output of fdisk -l--maybe someone will have more specific advice.

Look into System Imager. It does exactly what you want to do.

And backing up all of / then copying over most of what is the base install of Suse is just wasting your time. Search for bare-metal recovery. You can save time and space by just backing up any configuration changes for applications and data that isn't part of the actual OS install.

Agreed. Just copying stuff is highly dangerous, and even if it does work, things will probably be a bit...'off'.

Thank you all for your help. It is clear to me that, as a former Windows user, my understanding of real OSs is somewhat rudimentary.

Until this morning, my laptop was dual-boot (Windows and openSuse 11.0 x64). I decided that, as I haven't used Windows for months to get rid of it. One option was as I described - backup, re-install and then restore....however, it seems it's not as simple as that. I have now deleted the Windows partition and reformatted it to ext3. My aim is to redistribute the free space.

My disk info now shows:

DEVICE FILESYSTEM TOTAL SPACE AVAILABLE SPACE
------ ---------- ----------- ---------------
15G Media ext3 14.0 GB 2.8 GB
10G Media ext3 9.8 GB 478.9 MB
Data ntfs 40.1 GB 17.7 GB
48G Media ext3 44.7 GB 42.2 GB

I want to be able to reallocate the space from the 48G Media to the 10G Media. Unfortunately, these are not contiguous partitions. The relevant parts of the partition table are:

DEVICE SIZE TYPE MOUNT START END
------ ---- ---- ----- ----- ---
/dev/sda 111.7 GB ST91208234AS 0 14592
/dev/sda1 45.4 GB Linux native /tmp 0 5931
/dev/sda2 40.0 GB HPFS/NTFS /windows/D 5936 11168
/dev/sda3 26.2 GB Extended 11169 14592
/dev/sda5 2.0 GB Linux swap swap 11169 11430
/dev/sda6 9.9 GB Linux native / 11431 12731
/dev/sda7 14.2 GB Linux native /home 12732 14592

I want to move the empty space at sda1 to the end of sda6. sda6 is almost out of space and I have had a couple of software installations failing because of that.

Is there an easy way of getting sda6 to use the space at sda1? I think that I'm at the limit of my Linux knowledge with this, so any help would need to have step by step instructions which a child could follow.