saving home partition on reinstallation
 

Well, I said that I'd try not to reinstall slackware rather than try to fix problems that arise, but after deleting my /boot partition accidentally when compiling a new kernel (system still boots up, however), I've caused problems I've not yet been able to solve. The main problem is that when I run lilo, it cannot find /boot/vmlinuz, although it must be finding it somewhere since it boots up. I've searched my filesystem (whereis, find) and cannot locate it. I've remade the /boot directory, but that hasn't solved the problem, so I guess I'll just reinstall.

Question: I made another partition last installation for my /home directory. When reinstalling, I assume that partition will not be overwritten unless I say so. Will there be an option on the installation menu to use the previous home directory? I just need to know how to have the installation use the old one and not try to install a new one on the /home partition or the new /root partition.

thanks

Did you just remove the /boot partition from the partition table, or did you actually get rid of it? Have you tried mounting it in the /boot directory, with something like:

mount /dev/hda1 /boot

I mistyped a command while compiling the kernel

intended: rm -rf /boot/System.map

typed: rm -rf /boot System.map


so the whole /boot directory was removed from /

Removing /boot can be a problem
 

You might be able to resurrect the /boot directory and the contents by pulling them off the installation CD without performing a full installation.

First create /boot:

mkdir -p /boot

-p creates the directory if it doesn't exist, and does nothing if the dir already exists.

If you are able to boot in (either from CD, floppy, or some other means, once you're in,

mount /dev/cdrom /cdrom

or a valid mount point - perhaps /mnt, /mnt/cdrom, or whatever else is available.

Then use either tar or cp to copy the files in /boot to the disk.

For example:

(cd /cdrom/boot; tar cvf - . ) | (cd /boot; tar xvf -)