overwriting of etc folder with another system etc
 

hi,
I'm a fedora8 user.recently, i formatted my laptop.but i had zipped my etc folder in old fedora8.now, i've copied this etc folder of older fedora8 to new one in hope to regain all the changes tht i made in older one.also, i changed the name of root's home to 'HOME' from desktop. now, i'm unable to login.its showing an error.
what should i do???

Quickest option at this point is reinstall.

/etc contains lots of things that you don't want to just overwrite (including the passwd and shadow files).

I could understand why you wanted to do this, but it really isn't a safe practice.

What I would have suggested is unzip the files to a subdirectory in /tmp so that you can see the differences between individual files.