Mads Martin Joergensen wrote:

* Jeffrey Morton [Nov 25. 2003 20:51]:

...

I'm used to RedHat, where I have to tell it "format this, this, and this, but not that or that, and assign this to root, this to /usr, this to /var, etc..." It doesn't appear that SuSE has that functionality, unless I'm missing something.

Just choose the advanced partition selection (for experts) menu, and there you get to choose if format, and in such case, what filesystem to format with.

At what point do I choose that? I didn't see any opportunity before selecting new installation/update existing/ etc... When I selected new installation I saw the message "deleting partition..." and hit the power, since it hadn't asked to delete anything yet, really. When I selected "update existing", I couldn't find that option.

Alex Angerhofer wrote:

Jeffrey: forgive me for jumping into this thread without having read the previous posts in it carefully enough. Yet, from what this message seems to indicate you would like to install SuSE on top of an already partitioned RH install. I don't know whether this will work without any hidden hitches, as you may have to weed out configuration files that are RH-only by hand. Yet, what you can do if you do't want to reformat your existing partitions is to choose the new installation. Then where it says delete existing partition, you change that into whatever suits you. As Mads has explained you have to use the expert menu to do that. To get there, simply choose Partition from the drop-down menu at the bottom or click on the hyperlinked Partition heading that is followed by the red lines denoting that YaST intends to delete your partitions. You will have to choose the expert option twice in order to really get there, and I am sure you will know what to do then, simply edit existing partitions and assign mount points to them. If I were you, I would mv /etc and /var and perhaps /sbin to something else before attempting to install SuSE on your existing RH / partition to avoid confusing and perhaps contradictory configuration files. Finally, remember that whatever you choose for partitioning will not be done until the system has asked you to commit to the install. HTH.

Best regards, Alex.

Thank you, that's what I was asking, and what I needed to know. As for the configuration files, I plan on rebuilding the system from scratch, but I didn't want to lose the user data or shared media data. Things like qmail, courier-IMAP, etc, will be rebuilt from scratch. The configurations will actually be backed up, but only used for reference.

The Tuesday 2003-11-25 at 19:16 -0500, Jeffrey Morton wrote:

...

there you get to choose if format, and in such case, what filesystem to format with.

At what point do I choose that? I didn't see any opportunity before selecting new installation/update existing/ etc...

When I selected new installation I saw the message "deleting partition..." and hit the power, since it hadn't asked to delete anything yet, really. When I selected "update existing", I couldn't find that option.

Are you sure you saw deleting partition, or I will delete partition? I don't know about version 9, but SuSE installs always warn with a big signal before starting to format, or write to disk. Mi guess is that it tells you what it suggestion for formatting is, asking for you to accept or modify (in expert mode, probably). In any case, this is commented on the book. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson

* Jeffrey Morton [Nov 26. 2003 01:17]:

At what point do I choose that? I didn't see any opportunity before selecting new installation/update existing/ etc...

When I selected new installation I saw the message "deleting partition..." and hit the power, since it hadn't asked to delete anything yet, really. When I selected "update existing", I couldn't find that option.

When installing, you have this choice: Choose: Accept proposal as is Base partition setup on this proposal Create custom partition setup You choose the custom one, and another screen comes up asking you to choose a harddisk, where there's a menu saying "Custom partitioning - for experts." Did you even look in the user guide that came with 9.0? It's right there on page 22 and 23. -- Mads Martin Joergensen, http://mmj.dk "Why make things difficult, when it is possible to make them cryptic and totally illogical, with just a little bit more effort?" -- A. P. J.