Hi, I'm going to be changing Linux distros 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 as to put /usr/local on its own partition and now I want to save the stuff I have there before reinstalling. 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 re-installation This seems pretty straightforward, but I'm wondering if there's any way to accomplish this without explicitly copying the files (though I can't see how). Thanks so much for any advice and responses. I'd appreciate getting cc'd on them. Take care, Daniel *** Side question on md5sum: my understanding of ext2fs is that when copying or moving files within a partition, the files are not actually moved or copied, only the inode table is updated (and thus no md5sum is necessary as there is no risk of incorrect I/O related to move); however, when moving between partitions, the files actually have to be copied or moved, and thus an md5sum check would be prudent. Is this correct thinking, please? Thanks so much. --- Daniel A. Freedman Department of Physics Cornell University -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
