considering a reinstall...

papapenguin · l33t Joined: 20 Sep 2005 Posts: 694 Location: Bellevue

I've looked around for the answer in the forums, but could not find it.

I'm considering running the livecd 2007.0 install on my gentoo system (to try to reinstall my touchpad that has not worked since 2.6.18-r6)

If I left all my partitions alone, would this erase my data (documents, mail, etc)?

thanks,

John R. Graham · Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 11:38 pm Post subject:

So everything works like you like it except the touchpad? Let's just fix that. Tell me what type it is, what drivers you've installed, what brand your computer is (laptop, right?).

- John

papapenguin · l33t Joined: 20 Sep 2005 Posts: 694 Location: Bellevue

well, most everything. I have little errors such as realtime evdev and dhcp, but I haven't worried about those so much. I'd certainly appreciate help on the touchpad, here is where I've been posting it (its been a while since the last time I worked on it)...

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-555227-highlight-papapenguin.html

Medion MD40812 laptop

thyrihad · n00b Joined: 17 Jun 2003 Posts: 45

If you are intending to use the manual install method and not any GUI installer then there is no reason you will lose any of your personal data, as long as you don't recreate the filesystems (mke2fs etc.), when you get to that stage in the install.

You will however end up with a load of junk from the previous copy of gentoo because you will be replacing your package database.

You can of course not overwrite your package database (/var/db, /var/lib/portage, etc.), but you might as well not reinstall gentoo then because all you'll be getting is a new kernel.

You can update your kernel at any time yourself, see the guide here:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/kernel-upgrade.xml

If you do want to re-install and your /home folder is on it's own partition, I suggest you recreate all the other partition's filesystems but leave /home alone, install a clean gentoo, then mount your old home within it.
You will need to emerge all your old software again, but aside from that you should have your old setup back as it was.

But really, Gentoo is designed such that re-installs aren't necessary, which is why I love it so