Hi all, having had problems booting my system after a minor kernel upgrade (see: http://"http://www.linuxquestions.or...d-4175506695/"), I decided to reinstall my system.

Before that I did a backup of my /etc-diretory. I have done some tweaks like fstrim, prelinking libraries and creating several service files for systemd (cannot remember exactly for what exactly, should have been for network bridging for KVM, stuff for VMware Workstation, profile-sync-daemon) in order to speed up my system. Which parts of that directory are save to restore? I'm not looking into having to do all that work all over again.

Thanks for your help

You want only to restore files you have tweaked (in my case, for example, that's normally the smb.conf file). Restoring the entire directory is asking for trouble.

When you do, it's a good idea to rename the default file, rather than overwrite it, so that you can restore it the restored file breaks the install.

If you want to be super cautious, you can use something like diff or meld to compare the two files before making any changes.

I decided to restore only my tweaked sysctl.conf and the service files created in /etc/systemd.

Well, don't leave us hanging! How did it work out?

Well, for different reasons it became a total mess. Sabayon's package manager has the nice feature to restore the previously installed packages, one can export and import a database of all the packages installed. Contrary to Debian's APT this actually works (had some disappointing experiences).

Unfortunately this time it didnt't work. The re-installation process entered into a endless loop and after all packages had been re-installed a third time, my 50GB ROOT-partition ran full. So I decided to re-install the entire system (Yeah!). The newest version of Anaconda gave me some trouble, being sluggish and crashing repeatedly.

So currently I'm not quite done yet.

I would think that you need to take a copy of pre-existing /etc, install the new system and then
compare the two /etc's and make manual changes as and where necessary.

Allow a very long weekend...