Hi All,

Doing a clean re-install (mostly for fun and learning). My /home partition has all my data and I also store backups of all my installed packages there (kernels, software, etc). As long as I re-create the same username will my /home partition be accessible to me or is there anything special I should be aware of beforehand?

Thanks much,

Dig

In some distro's you need to make sure you do manual partitioning and make sure that when you identify that partition as /home, you select "DO NOT OVERWRITE". Otherwise, it will just install a new /home over the top.

Alternatively, you could re-install with /home on the / partition, and then once you have your system running, just change the fstab to point to your old /home partition and remount /home.

As to username, I think the UID also needs to be the same. So if your username joe is UID 1001, then you need to make sure the new joe also has UID 1001.

Hi and thanks...

I'll be setting up my machine exactly as it is now so when I 'adduser' using the same username and allow it to use the next available ID I assume it will choose the same UID as before.

I will be backing up my /home partition just in case, but this is partially an exercise in how to reinstall Slackware while keeping data intact so I'll be curious to see how it goes. I want to wreck my system now while it's not mission critical in order to learn how to do this properly down the road. If that makes any sense!

I'm especially interested in the partitioning aspect. When it asks me, do I simply point it to the same /home partition but request that it NOT reformat? Is it really that simple?

Dig

It is in Debian, but I haven't installed Slackware in a long long long long time. So I'm not sure what the partitioning tool is like.

digger95, it'll ask you to mount any other partitions and to define their mount points during installation. Just select your /home partition and define it as /home. It'll then ask you if you wish to format it (Quick format, Full format, and No format, if I recall correctly). Choose NOT to format it. It'll just use the available /home partition leaving all files intact.

Thanks that's very helpful.

One more question: If I want to 'reset' all my settings for Firefox, Thunderbird, KDE, etc. and rebuild from the ground up, can I just delete all the hidden files on my /home partition and leave only my data? That seems correct to me but I am often wrong about such things.

Dig

Yes. Except be careful, because your Inbox, for example, is in the hidden directories, so you probably don't want to delete that.


Brian

Hi,

If you delete the '/home/user/.kde' that will be created again.

Thanks everyone for your input. Much appreciated. I have backed up my Thunderbird inbox, Firefox bookmarks, etc. into their own backup directories on my /home partition so I can copy them over once this is complete. I'm gonna go ahead and do this and just see how it goes. I'll post back with the results.

digger95, I believe that should work. Almost all programs (including Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.) and even window managers/desktop environments keep their settings etc. stored in hidden directories or files in your home directory. To restore all user-based settings to default, you can delete all of the files/directories starting with a '.'. (Be careful when deleting though -- if you do `rm -rf .*`, you'll delete EVERYTHING because it'll recognize it as ./filename etc.). You could delete using a graphical filemanager (Konqueror works well if you disable hiding hidden folders) or you could rig something up like the following (use at your own risk -- I'm not an expert):

Worked great. Thanks.