I am brand new to this list. I'm hoping autoinstall can help me with a problem I'm having. I am trying to migrate from SuSE 8.1 Pro to SuSE 9.0 Pro. The conversion goes fine, and everything works afterward (well there is one minor glitch, but that's something I can work on as I have time). My major concern, however, is being able to recover from a major system crash. I tried to go on from 9.0 to 9.1 and had problems. I had backed up 9.0, so I figured all I would have to do would be to re-install 9.0 out of the box, recover my backup, and I'd be right back in business in 9.0. Well, it didn't work that way. Many things that had been working when I did the conversion from 8.1 to 9.0 no longer worked when I did the recovery. I ended up having to restore my 8.1 installation to get a working system back. My suspicion is that the out of the box install of 9.0 installs some packages that the 8.1 to 9.0 conversion process didn't install. I'm thinking that, during the conversion, SuSE could see from what I had that certain packages would conflict and so made necessary adjustments. During the recovery, since SuSE had nothing to go on during that initial out of the box install, it put some packages on there that were incompatible with what I had in my backup. So, when I recovered the backup, I had a mishmash situation with the packages and that's why certain things would no longer function. Of course, all of this is speculation on my part, but I can't think of any logical reason why a conversion would work just fine but an out of the box install followed by a recovery would not. So, that's what brought me to this list. I'm hoping this installation problem is something that autoinstall could help resolve. What I would like to do is simply point to my backup during the initial install and say "only install the packages that are in this backup, no more and no less". My hope is that this is exactly the type of thing that autoinstall would handle. I notice that my backups generate an autoinstall list in addition to the file containing the actual backup data. I'm thinking this file must be usable somehow in an autoinstall process to instruct SuSE as to the particular packages that need to be loaded for the installation. I also suspect that there may be different degrees of autoinstall, all the way from being able to simply push a button (so to speak) and have the entire install take place to variations where part of the install is manual and part is automated. The main thing I want to automate is the package part. If I have to intervene during other parts of the installation, that's no big deal. Of course, if the amount of effort needed to get everything fully automated is not that much greater, then I would (of course) be interested in that also. Am I on the right track in thinking that this is right up autoinstall's alley (so to speak)? Could some sort of a basic autoinstall procedure take care of what I'm trying to get done here? Any help greatly appreciated. Yours truly, Greg Wallace