keep data in home slice when reinstalling
 

I have been toying around with my RH9 system for somewhat over a year now. It´s full of installed rpms, and as it is always running, I put a lot of disks in it a year ago.

The thing only has a dvd rom unit and three harddisks, one of 60, and two of 120GB.

At the time it seemed handy for me to put all that space in a LVM partition. SO what happened was this; I took 20GB from the 60gb disk, made a root slice and made a boot slice in this partition.

All the other space I had left I made LVM partitions and put them all together to make a 280 GB /home. (yes it is rediculous but we share a lot of data in the house) It is getting full already anyway.

However, I want to upgrade the sytem now. Fedora2 tickles my fancy at the moment, and the best for me would be:

a) to keep the partitioning intact (nothing wrong with it)
b) to delete/format all data EXCEPT /home
c) to keep the data on the h00j /home
d) to keep named data available when I reinstall linux (because ofcourse it is in some user directory...)

How would I do this? I´m really paranoid about losing the data, you see. And burning CD´s would take me like (230/0,7) cd´s and (cd´s*7) minutes, so it´s not really an option (and yes a DVD burner is high on my wish list but as of now unavailable).

I've never installed FC2 but in most distros that aren't specifically designed for the beginner they let you have complete control over your partitioning on install...if you know the partition number of your /home partition (i.e. /dev/hda3 or whatever) you should be able to select not to format it and just have it added to the fstab as /home.

Even if you can't add it to fstab during install, as long as you have the option not to format it you can do it later.

I guess the best thing is to start the install...most utils make you confirm any partitioning changes before it commits them - meaning you should be able to bail out if it doesn't look like it's gonna do what you want.

Alternatively use Slackware because I did exactly what you're asking about when I reinstalled slack.

And the data was conserved? Or did you have to move it from the user directories to the root of /home?

I´m a little scared the data will be locked because of user rights etc.

Yes, the data was absolutely fine. In fact it meant all my windowmaker settings were saved :)
No, I kept the data exactly where it was. My /home was a separate partition meaning that /home/sab300 (me) was on that partition - so if I didn't format that partition, my data was not touched.

And even if your permissions do get screwed remember that the root user can move anybody's files - you can chown them / chmod them back to the rightful owner if they get 'locked'.

Basically you have two choices - you spend a lot of time backing up or you try it and see what happens.

I suggest you make a tar backup of /home and put it out of harms way. On cd if you have a cd burner.
When I install a new distro. I have just installed FC2
I recreate all my users:-

adduser lazarus

chown -R lazarus /home/lazarus

All this must be done as root

I wrote a small script that sets up all my users. So after a freash install I just run that.

Did you read his post? He has 260GB of data...now where do you suggest he puts that 'out of harms way'?

Actually if you've installed FC2 you can say whether it lets you leave a partition unformatted during install as xtra is only looking for reassurance that his data will be untouched