Try gentoo, but keep slack

[riekon]

I am currently running WinXP on hda and Slack on hdb.
I dont remember why, but i installed my /home under /hdb6 while root is under /hdb1.

I want to try Gentoo and put it on my /hdb6 partition, but i first want to save my /home.

What would be the best way to go about this?

should i cp or mv /home to a different spot? and if i do.. how can i make sure its on hdb1 without having to reboot without my /hdb6?

[mdwatts]

You could tar (with gzip if you like) the /home directory and contents and then copy the resulting tar to another partition.

Do you have a cdwriter? That would also work.

[dkeav]

you could unmount the partition in slack and remount it under a different point, then copy the files to the new /home on your root partition, be sure to edit the fstab to remove the /home partition

[Loki3]

If you have a CD-RW I highly recommend you backup your /home directory by burning it to a cd before you do anything just as a matter of pre-caution. Either of the solutions provided should work fine provided you have enough space on your / directory, for a new /home parition.

Back up... back up... back up. It sucks to loose data.

[Digit0]

Originally posted by Loki3
Back up... back up... back up. It sucks to loose data.

My 120G. :( buaaaaaaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

[riekon]

copied /home to /home2
unmounted hdb6
copied /home2 to new /home.
installed gentoo to /dev/hdb6

now the only problem is im not sure the exact syntax to use when im am setting up lilo. Do i need lilo installed on Gentoo as well as Slackware? or can i use my existing lilo.conf to boot into Gentoo?

if so, what additional options need to be placed? Guidance is greatly appreciated.

[freakmn]

did you make sure to edit /etc/fstab on your slack install? if not, it will try to mount your gentoo partition to /home, which could screw things up.

After doing that, to install lilo, you would want to:

-boot into gentoo


mkdir /mnt/slack
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/slack


-edit lilo to have your current gentoo kernel, as well as a kernel in /mnt/slack
-under the slack kernel, add "root=/dev/hdb1"
-run lilo