re-installing Debian

[David Bruzos]

Hi Glenn:
The answer to your question is yes.  As long as you have a /home partition, then all you have to do is not format your 
/home partition when you install over.  Make sure that you have the partition by checking if the root partition (/) is  
different from your /home.  For example, your root might be something like /dev/hda2 and your /home might be something like 
/dev/hda4.  If both are the same, then you will have to use another method of backing up your files.  Use the "df" command 
to find out, or look in /etc/fstab.
If you can burn your stuff to CD, I definitly recommend you do that.  Sometimes a simple mistake can result in your HDD 
getting wiped out.  I just recently made one of those mistakes and load-leveled my root partition.  I was trying to repare 
an HD with bad blocks and I typed /dev/hda instead of /dev/hdc, it was late at night!  Good thing that all of 
my docs/music/movies/etc are on my server over NFS!  Oh well, I ended up reinstalling Gentoo instead of FC3 and I am very 
happy with it...

HTH

David B.

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 10:54:31PM -0500, Glenn at home wrote:
> First of all, I wanted to mention here that I was going through some of the 
> messages I have saved since I first installed Debian, and it is wonderful 
> how I have gotten so much help from this list, even though it seems that I 
> still have a lot to learn.
> 
> I have been trying to fix my broken Debian since I really messed it up with 
> a failed attempt at upgrading.
> I did:
> apt-get dist-upgrade
> and now I get a kernel panic: attempt to kill init
> and above that it reads:
> modprobe error invalid line 237 in init.conf
> or something like that.
> And I have looked at line 237, and even tried remming it out, with # and it 
> still does not work.
> 
> I know someone who was going to try and log on with SSH, but he cannot get 
> through my router.
> So it seems that that option is out.
> 
> So I was wondering if I can just re-install Debian without losing my files 
> in /home/ftp/etc/pub?
> Thanks for any ideas.
> Glenn
> 
> 
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