Saving file systems on reinstall?

[Wobbly]

OK. I have had some serious problems with permisssion files. I posted a couple of moths ago here with the problem, and no one here (LNO) or any of my Linux Geek friends have been able to figure it out. I fear I may have to just reinstall. My question is this: If I reinstall the OS, will I loose all of my files that I have created (in Office52, for example)? I know when I have reinstalled MS Sh*t, all of my files were still there, but since *everything* is linux is a file, I wonder. Is it possible to reinstall everything except /home/smulryan (my usr files)?


I can't even copy my files onto a floppy to save them from reinstall because I get "Read-only" error messages when I use the cp command (and I have to do all of this as su because of the permissions troubles I have been having). I know the files are not read only. Grrrr. But this is more of a rant than part of the question

I think my old housemate logged in as root and did something. Unfortunately, he denies it, so I can't figure out what he did to repair it. He was the last one to use it before it went haywire :mad:

Oh, yeah, I'm using SuSE 7.0

Thanks

[fancypiper]

If you have a separate partition, then in the install, choose not to format the partition and nothing is lost. That's why I use a separate partition for things I want to keep. My /home and /mp3 partitions are separate from the system stuff on /.

See Copying Directory Trees with (tar | tar) (http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/lpt/18_16.html) which preserves the permission unlike other methods.

You might be interested in
Un-fry your Linux System (http://www.eunuchs.org/linux/unfry/unfry_content.html) as well.

Good luck.

[Choozo]

A couple of things you need to be aware of when reinstalling is the UIDs (User IDentities) for the users you add to the system during (or after) reinstalling:

Mandrake and RedHat (certainly others also) start their first UID differently (First user on RedHat: 500. First user on Mandrake: 501).

If you add more than one user (not counting root) when reinstalling the _same_ distro, make sure you add them in the same order as the initial install. Otherwise you will have to clean up _all_ the permissions afterwards.

What all this mounts up to is that you may not be allowed to login in e.g. KDE if you have a different UID after the reinstall. (Correct username and password is just ignored when the UID is different).

[Wobbly]

This is a bit irrelavent to my original question, but it seems as though I fixed the permissions problem. It seems that at some point in my tweaking, I was curious about security settings. I was tooling around in YAST, went to System Adminstration -> Security Settings -> General Information on Security, and changed file permissions are set to: secure
(it was set on easy). This was the months of frustration and confusuion. One more reason to keep a log book of what the heck you tweak with, when, and why. I feel like a total fool for this, but alas, this is how we learn. :rolleyes:

Thanks y'all for your support.