Hello,

I have a debian Sarge install.
I have a reiserfs partition as my main
linux partition. I have some data in my home folder.
I would like to install debian again while keeping
the home folders (or importing their data) .
Is this possible?

Regards,
Deep

There are several ways of approaching this depending on your harware. If you only have a single disk that has a single partition and you want to reinstall to that disk then you are going to archive the data on some other media first and then copy the data back when you have installed the new system. You are probably wise to always have /home on a separate partition for this reason. If you have a the same situation as above but a second hard drive then you could create a new partition on the second disk then copy the data to this partition and then when you have finished the new install edit your /etc/fstab so that it links this partition as your /home.
If you need more detailed info then we need to know the actual structure that you are using so that we can give you more detailed info.

Unfortunately theres only disk.
And home is in the same partition as the rest of the linux install.

In fact heres is my complete setup

/dev/hda1 windows xp extended partition
/dev/hda2 debian sarge reiserfs partition
/dev/hda3 linux swap
/dev/hda4 windows xp primary partition

May I ask why you want to do a reinstall?

I installed oracle 10 on the debian machine
and as it turned out , oracle 10 is very slow on
a reiserfs partition. So i tried to convert my partition
to convertfs ext3. The conversion didnt go well.

Debian in normal gnome doesnt start up. (This is possibly
because the oracle installation required me to modify quite a
few initialisation files, and i think something went wrong in the process)
Debian still runs in failsafe gnome. And the data is still there.
However apt-get doesnt work (because of missing partial directories),
and /bin isnt in the path (i dont know if it is supposed to be).

In short i seem to have a sub optimal debian box

And for most difficulties i dont know what is the reason because it could be

1) I edited the initialisation files, so things arent initialising right. ( Which is supported
by the fact that GNOME failsafe works (no initialisation scripts run) and normal Gnome doesnt.)

2) The convertfs screwed things around.

So

Thats the story.

Sounds like your best bet would be to just copy the files from your home directory to a CD and start from scratch.

Okay, will give it a try.