From: Tony Williams 

Boot using Tom's Root-Boot disk ( http://www.toms.net/rb/ ) and nuke
everything but your home directory. Then rename your home directory
something like /home/antti.save . At this point you should have a disk with
nothing on it but blank partitions except for the saved directory.

Install RH but don't let it format any of your partitions.

When the install has completed you can copy the saved files into your new
home directory. You may want to be careful about copying any dot-files like
.login because that'll mess with the user setup that RH gives you. You
might also need to chown and chgrp the saved files to fix their ownership
and permissions.

I've used this method through many reinstalls and I've never lost anything.
It's actually got to the stage where I have a customised desktop which I
take from machine to machine with me so I get the same look and feel
whatever machine/distro I'm using - it even moved fairly painlessly over to
OS X running XDarwin.

Making switches like this easy is one reason to install stuff in your home
directory when given the option.

Speaking of which, something to be careful of is to get a copy any shared
data (usually somewhere under /opt or /share) in your home directory.

BTW, tomsrtbt is a must-have disk for system recovery and troubleshooting,
for Windows systems as well as Linux.

--
Tony

Antti Kurenniemi wrote:
> Alrighty. Can you suggest any way to salvage the files from this box (no
> cd-writer, and files are too big for disk)?
>
>
> Antti Kurenniemi
> (installing RedHat 8.0 on another box already)
>
> "Joe Barr"  wrote in message
> news:3de6179b{at}w3.nls.net...
>
>>Yes, you can install over the Mandrake partitions.  Or if you feel
>>confident, you can go into fdisk and manually remove the Mandrak
>>partitions and recreate some for Red Hat.
>>
>>Just be careful of your Windows stuff.
>>
>
>
>

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