OK, I understand this better now. I don't know Debian particularly. Most of my experience is with Redhat, where the initial boot disk doesn't matter as much, as long as you have the more up to date CD ROMs or ISO images. I certainly do understand about wanting to minimize the work involved. Because the best laid plans can so oft go astray, I suspect it's still wise to back up critical files to the extent you can. This should include the things that are not easily replaced--yhour data files from /home, anything you've spent time configuring and tweaking in /etc, certainly your mail spool file in /var/spool/mail. If you have the full Debian install and the space to put that on your current hd, you might want to consider rsync to bring it up to date and then burning a new set of CD ROMS before undergoing to hardware work. If that's a reasonable possibility, it could prove worth it. My most recent experience with something like this came last spring. I set out to drop a new slave hard drive into my office computer. Something went wrong and my old hard unexpectedly came up dead. I had no choice but to reinstall from scratch. For the first time in my life, after just a brief moment of panic, I realized that I was really OK because everything important was backed up. Today, the knowledge that my critical data is backed up gives me the confidence to play around with parted which is new to me. As with most things new, mistakes come along with the successes. But, it's no hardship because of the backups. On Tue, 4 Dec 2001, Cheryl Homiak wrote: > On Tue, 4 Dec 2001, Janina Sajka wrote: > > simply install then move the data, including appropriate /etc > > configurations, back over. Certainly seems more secure and less > > experimental to me. > I would say you are basically right, only how far would I have to go with > the install? What I don't like is that I have to use speakup disk that are > an older version than my present system, and I don't want to install the > old kernel and base system etc. If I can just use the debian rescue and > root disk to create my partitions and initialize them I don't have > aproblem, but I'm trying to avoid having to use ppp at all and having to > do a massive upgrade after I install. > > Cheryl > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Blinux-list@redhat.com > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list > -- Janina Sajka, Director Technology Research and Development Governmental Relations Group American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Email: janina@afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175 Chair, Accessibility SIG Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF) http://www.openebook.org Will electronic books surpass print books? Read our white paper, Surpassing Gutenberg, at http://www.afb.org/ebook.asp Download a free sample Digital Talking Book edition of Martin Luther King Jr's inspiring "I Have A Dream" speech at http://www.afb.org/mlkweb.asp Learn how to make accessible software at http://www.afb.org/accessapp.asp