partitioned hard disk, without losing most of my data to the bit bucket.
there is something called backup / restore :-) While I find the yast offered way rather clumsy, I now use squashfs, which has a compression rate just as high as tar gzip and the backup archive can be mounted as volume. See Bug 390201
I always have to go right down into expert partitioning to throw the useless yast proposals away, which always move partition boundaries thus hosing my disk. IIRC often the proposal didn't even manage to reuse the existing swap partition (which can be shared between multiple Linux installaions). There is no simple "new installation on which existing partition".
Fully agreed, as I am still using powerquest for backing up partitions ( two windows, one linux ) I need a simple setup that can be backed up / restored without to much hassle. Casual