I have one 500 GB drive in my box with a partition and mount point named /ftp


I want to do a fresh install of fedora 8 without killing this directory or its contents. Is this possible?

Yes. :-)

To be more specific, you need to figure out what partition is being mounted on /ftp (df can help) and when you install Fedora 8 simply choose not to format that partition (you'll need to go into manual partition set up to set up your other partitions that you do qwant formatted -- don't choose the auto-partitioner). I like to make a back-up anyway just in case I get sticky fingers and format the wrong thing, but it is doable.

Thank You BT. I tried this last night (I did make a backup thank god) and when I rebooted the partition was still there but not mounted. I created a mount point (mkdir /mnt/ftp then did mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/ftp) and I got it mounted. The problem was I had to do that every time I rebooted and even then none of the user account could mount the partition without root access.

I have only been using linux for a couple months so I do not know too much. Can you explain or point me to some good info on how I would have accomplished this correctly?

In the installer, you should have clicked on the partition and told it to mount it as /mnt/ftp -- sorry, I should have mentioned this to you in my previous reply. Now that you have it though, just add the partition to /etc/fstab so it gets mounted automatically on boot. Assuming the filesystem is ext3, the line would look something like: