On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 6:16 PM, Joe S <[email protected]> wrote: > On January 23, 2010 12:43:24 pm Hendrik Schaink wrote: >> OTOH, I do not really understand your motive for wanting to swap >> /home dirs. Do you want to keep distro A /home partition safe >> _or_ do you want to re-install distro B but keep its /home >> partition intact? >> >> HTH, Hendrik > > At present I just have a link from Distro A to the /home of Distro > B. I plan to remove Distro B, so I would like to switch the /home > directory Distro A.
If you know what you are doing, you can do this without much difficulty. Personally, I would avoid it for one reason. If you are going to do this, you should back up your /home partition to another computer/drive (or DVDs). You should be backing up your /home partition regularly anyway, but this is a perfect opportunity to make sure your backups work! Since you have a backup of your partition, or at least your user directory, all you have to do is reformat the /home partition during your install, and restore your files from your backup. This way, if it doesn't work, you can still add a new user, then copy all of your important files over manually from your backup. There are only two problems you may run into I can think of: - You may have personal configuration files in your home directory that may conflict with the versions of the programs on your new distro. For most programs, it will not be an issue. However, it could prevent you from logging in as that user in extreme cases. Log in as root if this happens, and add a new user with a different name. - You may accidently wipe out the wrong partition, so be careful! This is not so bad if you keep good backups of your important data. Have fun! -Mark C. _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
