I want to reinstall suse 9.0 on my computer. Is there any I can easily repartion my hardrive so I can keep the documents in my home folder when I reinstall.

How is your hard drive partitioned now? Just Linux, or do you have any other OS's on there?

Is /home a seperate partition or part of another? If it's part of another partition, you'll need to perform a backup of /home as, AFAIK, you can't save it.

Thanks for answering. My hardrive is split-up in the following way.
dev/hda 115.0 GB My Hardrive
dev/hda1 42.8GB /windows/C (formatted fat32)
dev/hda2 1011.8MB Linux Swap
dev/hda3 71.1GB / (Linux Native)

All my files are saved on dev/hda3 which is the hardrive I want to re-install on.
Thanks for any help.

Since /home is a part of / on your system, you can't seperate them for your purposes. In this instance, I am afraid, you would have to back up /home to cd/dvd/external hardrive/etc and reinstall. When you reinstall, create /home on it's own partition and avoid this in future.

Thanks for the help XavierP. Is there anyway I can resize my linux partion so I copy files over to the resised part. Then could I reinstall linux using that part of my hardrive as my /home directory

QTParted or the System Rescue CD may be able to do this. BUT use them at your own risk - I have never tried to do this so I don't know how well or badly they will work. Make sure you have a recent backup available in case you wreck your install - and read the instructions on the sites.

Oh, and if you use either one, let us know how you got on.

Since you have Windows FAT32 partition, you may want to move your doc to Win partition. At least, you could use Partition Magic to resize your Windows partition to free up some space. Format and mount this new free space as FAT, move your doc there. Then, you should be able to rebuild your SuSE.

Good luck!

I'm coming late to this thread, but this'd be your best bet.

I also set up separate partitions for /var, /boot, and I believe /opt.

I'll get back with you all if you're interested.

Kyle

Thanks again to everyone who has helped me. Much appreciated. I have finally backed up all my files and am about to reinstall linux. These are the partitons I am going to make

/opt
/boot
/var
/home

Could anyone suggest the sizes of these and any other directorys that I could also add.

Thanks again

Here's what I did,

60 GB hdd, %50 ntfs (win xp pro sp2)

the rest if for SuSE 9.1 Pro, and here's the breakdown:

2.1 GB for /opt, at 76.9% utilization
18.6 GB for /home at 37.8% utilitization (has grown from install, and more room for it to grow.)
5.4 GB for /usr at 57.5% utilization
2.1 GB for / at 15.3% utilization
250.7MB for /boot at 7.4% utilization (where the kernel is stored, I think)
517.7MB for /var at 43.0% utilization (I believe most logs are in /var
the rest (I think, if you do the math it's 1.5 GB) is for swap partition.
I don't think my tmpfs is pointing to that though, it looks like it's pointing to /dev/shm.

Anyhow, I *may* re-partition these again, with the exception of /home so the rest of the bars are at %50 which would look pretty cool in kdiskfree.

But, I may not do that.

I did research on the net, and the percentages I came up with from others are what I went with for this setup.

YMMV, of course, and again good luck!

Thanks