Ok i had FC3 installed and wanted to try a new partitioning scheme and reinstall it. I have another harddrive that has FC2 on it. From FC2 i used fdisk to delete all the partitions on that disk and create my new partitions. i noticed that the first partition was reisferfs already and used mkreisferfs to make the other two partitions the same. In the install process i set the first partition to root and the other two to tmp and var. When it asked if i wanted to format it i said no because i figured because i deleted the partitions and created new ones that i wouldn't have to. I remember during the install process, i think when i first tried to boot in, i had a screen come up to create users, this time no screen came up and i went right to the login screen. So i had to login as root. i looked at the /etc/passwd file and there is an entry for the login name i had on the old install. I was able to cd to /home/oldlogin and it had the files on there from the old install. I noticed some programs installed that i had choose not to install during the second install. When i download files they go right to my root home. I can' su - oldlogin and it doesn't ask for a password (i don't know if it does normally or not)

so basically my question is what did i do/didn't do to have my old files in the new install. In other words what do i need to do to get the disk ready for a fresh install. And if it involves the formatting that i foregoed in the install process is there a way to do that pre-installation?

i don't think this matters but i did not edit my grub menulst file cuz i was installing the same os using the same cds.