Hey everyone!

Alright so I need some advice from Slackware lovers.

A few months ago I set up my first linux box. It resides right beside my main Win Computer and acts as a storage box/ linux os for me to practice with.

When I initialy installed a linux distro I picked Fedora for it's easy install and ease of use. Now I'm starting to dislike all the bagage that comes with it. After alot of research I'm thinking that slackware might be the right OS for me

The only thing holding me back is the files that I've got on the linux box that I dont want to loose. There residing in the /home/user/storage folder. Is there anyway I can install slack without loosing these files?

Thanks so much, I'm excited about getting started!

Basttrax

I'm a newbie on this, but... can't u do a tar with that?
Then you save that tar anywhere and when you install Slack you can put them back wherever u want.

El Barto

Is /home a separate partition from the install? If so you *should* be able to leave it alone, but I'd back it up on a CD or another HD or something just to be sure. If it's all installed on one great big partition like me I would try the tar suggestion and burn it to a CD. Either way I'd still burn them to a CD or something if that's an option because I wouldn't want to risk losing my files by leaving them on a HD that I'm reinstalling a different OS on.

It's in the area of 20+ gigs. It might be hard to backup on CD .

Maybe I should just copy everything back to the windows computer for the time being and do a fresh install of Slack?

Hi,

Your saying that /home is how big? If it is full at +20G then NFS to another system your /home-backup that can store that amount, that is if one is available on your network.

Wow, I've only been using my Slack for a couple months and my /home/user is only a couple GB.

Just delete everything but the data you don't want to loose and choose not to format when installing Slackware.

I was thinking of doing that. Using whats already there.
My only concern is Fedora was using logical volumes. Something I dont know alot about.

Is Logical Volumes going to be a problem?

I think you can check by command df -h, if you /home dir is mounted as a separate partition, you will see /home in the output, then you can just keep your data in /home/, but make sure you do not format it during installation of slackware. Write down the partition name "/dev/hdaX" of /home dir for reference. If you do not see "/home" after you type df -h, you should definitely back it up before installation of slackware.

I use a separate partition just for /home dir, and df -h shows the following, see the line in color:
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda7 9.8G 7.3G 2.6G 74% /
/dev/hda8 17G 14G 2.8G 84% /home
/dev/hda1 6.4G 6.2G 184M 98% /winc
/dev/hda5 4.0G 3.7G 255M 94% /wind

Is there a special option i have to put in while installing?
Also
Can I just format the other partitions righth from the slacks disc with fdisk?

oh and my df -h turned up this

[basttrax@localhost ~]$ df -ha
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
72G 46G 22G 68% /
/dev/proc 0 0 0 - /proc
/dev/sys 0 0 0 - /sys
/dev/devpts 0 0 0 - /dev/pts
/dev/hda1 99M 18M 76M 20% /boot
/dev/shm 252M 0 252M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb1 2.4G 1.9G 356M 85% /media
none 0 0 0 - /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
sunrpc 0 0 0 - /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs
automount(pid2076) 0 0 0 - /net

u can mount ur windows partition in linux and copy the necessary files to that
like
as root
#fdisk -l
get the partition of windows
mount it to some folder called /windows(if not create it
by mkdir windows at /)if it vfat
by
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /windows
now u can c ur windows thing indows folder of linux and then copy
then install a "clean linux" , and put a sticker of tux on ur cpu
----

when u instll slack i think u dont need to create a seperate /boot as u done with fedora
instead u can assign some 5-6 gb to /
and rest to /home Hi after finishing it go through the thread by shilo (first sticky)-"How do i do it all"
best of luck welcome to slack world

Alright so....
It worked!

Thanks everyone. I'm now using samba.
It was nice to go through and pick which packages i wanted. And everything worked flawless throughout the install. (Which is rare with me)

Thanks again! (onto samba )

Basttrax