Hi, I'm going to be upgrading an older RH6.0 box to potato (to join my other two 2.2 boxen) and thus, obviously, reinstalling most software. Fortunately, I had placed my /home directory on its own partition, so I don't have to worry about my personal files being touched. Unfortunately, I wasn't so smart back then as to put /usr/local on its own partition and now I want to save the stuff I have there before installing Debian. I'm fairly sure I understand the process, but I'm just wondering if there's an easier way. I was planning to: 1. Make a new partition on the HD using previously un-partitioned sectors. 2. Build a filesystem on the new partition 3. Mount the new partition (maybe /mnt/temp) 4. Copy the data from /usr/local to /mnt/temp 5. Run md5sum on original data in /usr/local; compare with 'md5sum -c <file>' to new data on /mnt/temp 6. Unmount the old partition from /usr/local 7. Unmount the new partition from /mnt/temp 8. Update /etc/fstab to tell it about new partition for /usr/local 9. Re-mount the new partition over the old mount point 10.Ready to do Debian installation This seems pretty straightforward, but I'm wondering if there's any way to accomplish this more easily or without explicitly copying the files (though I can't see how). Thanks so much for any advice and responses. Take care, Daniel
P.S. I saved Karsten's posting from last week of his mini-FAQ on Linux Partitioning and it's going to be really helpful in fine-tuning my newer partition-scheme (which was already much improved over my earlier RH one). Thanks so much, Karsten. -- Daniel A. Freedman Laboratory for Atomic and Solid State Physics Department of Physics Cornell University
