hi,

1)Shall I able to install linux via another installed copy in a hard disk (suppose I am booting from first cd or linux rescue cd - fedora) - am I able to use dd command and copy every thing from the intalled hard to installing hard disk as norton ghost do with windows?

2)how can I create a bootable usb with fedora grub which will allow me to follow the fedora upgrade/Install via it to the local hard disk?

3)in previous linux installation (suppose fedora 8) shall I able to install fedora 10 without formatting /home /var /opt (actally I want to know if this is possible what is the minimum partitions I have to create without losing data of previous - I guess /lib /usr /boot contains distro constraints and need to recreate where /home /opt swp can be reused?)

4)Shall I able to do part 3 among different flavors of rpm distros like between fedora and centos (how about ubuntu and fedora?)

thank you

yesread you distro info yesclarify please well I run 4 distros right now another in vm and another you need about 10 gig per distro. for full installs. otherwise use puppy Linux and use 96 mb .
could you please limit the question one per problem there are many people that have great expertise in different fields of linux. linux is an Operating system not a bag of device bugs with a bunch of prebuilt software and Norton could not begin to do the stuff we do with the dd commands like make and image and compress it at the same time and put it on many different types of medias. I have a friend that hates windows but he uses it because he can fix it reinstall god day.
No one I know need to use a program like ghost in linux because the there is no need for it. and if you think there is you need to use google Oh thats a linux operating system to.

Try using partimage for what you want to achieve with Ghost. It's free and GPL.

Hi I guess part 3) and 4) is not clear in my writing.

3)suppose you installed fedora 4 and you want to install fedora 10 in the same. But as u have partitioned /, /usr , /boot/, /var, /opt, /home -- I feel in new installation you can use old /opt, /var, and /home and create new partitions (by deleting older) for / and /usr and /boot.

4)Now how about doing the same (the part 3) from fedora 10 to centos (both are alike distros). And I wonder is it posible to doing the same between fedora and ubuntu???

Also I know all these can be done and I have gone into testing of these too. But if you guys have experianced these, it would be really benificial to me than doing time consuming testings again.

So please refer me to the detail of how-to's...

Thank you

Well, would the simplest thing not to have separate root partitions for each distro you want, along with a shared /home partition? After all, what are you wanting to share?