How to move settings, presets & favorites during Mandriva update
 

I've had a problem with my computer being stuck in terminal window mode. Rather than keep fighting with it, I've decided to update to the later version of Mandriva (Moving from Mandriva 2007.1 to Spring 2008). I'd like advice on moving Firefox bookmarks, and podcast links into the updated OS.
I don't totally look forward to upgrading the OS because there's usually trauma involved in getting some periphreal recognized -- it took forever to get the computer to talk to my HP All in One printer (I had to keep fiddling with the hplip driver). If there are other files I should move, please let me know.

Thanks for the help.

Some information would be helpful. Is your /home directory in the same partition as the root filesystem, or is /home in a partition of it's own?

If /home is in it's own partition, just don't touch that partition when you upgrade Mandriva. All of your personal files/settings/preferences/bookmarks will be preserved. If you mess up and format that partition, it's all lost. Word to the wise: make a backup before upgrading (such as an .iso archive of the /home folder burned to CD/DVD), just in case you do mess up.

If /home is in the same partition as the root of the filesystem, make a backup of /home (copy it to another disk or burn it to CD/DVD) then restore the files to /home after the upgrade.

Other files to backup: any files in /etc that you have spent a lot of time tweaking, any databases that you may have created, along with the grant tables.

Thanks for the info. I got started on my upgrade before I got your reply. I did make CD ISO's of my hard drive to save the data on them. This was a good thing because Mandriva 2008 didn't want to upgrade my 2007 version, it wanted to do a reinstall. I did the reinstall and most everything is fine. (Except for the connection to my HP All-In-One printer which was difficult to connect when I originally bought it -- it doesn't want to connect up with Mandriva software, it wants to use the purpose-designed HP driver -- hplip.)
I didn't know about the /etc folder, though. Can you tell me more about it?
Thanks