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 > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
