[ale] Going Debian; partman question

[Jim]

Bob Slaughter wrote:
> I'm getting ready to upgrade my 2.0-kernel Mandrake 7.1 based system to Debian 
> Sarge 3.1r1, and I have a question about partman's (the partitioner and disk 
> formatter). I have some existing ext2 partitions I want to wipe and convert to 
> ext3, but two ext2's I want to leave alone (they're holding the backups of my 
> home directory and the old contents of /etc with all the old configuration 
> information). I can't find any reference in the Debian Install documentation 
> how much control on whether a partition get formatted or not.
>
> Can anyone here answer this for me?
>
> Anything else I should know about? Should I be worried about my NC100 ethernet 
> card?
>
> My current fstab with notes below:
>
> /mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom supermount fs=iso9660,dev=/dev/cdrom 0 0
> /mnt/floppy /mnt/floppy supermount fs=vfat,dev=/dev/fd0 0 0
>
> /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat user,exec,umask=0 0 0
> /dev/hda2 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hda5 / ext2 defaults 1 1
> /dev/hda6 /home ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hda7 /usr ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hda8 swap swap defaults 0 0
> /dev/hda9 /music ext2 exec,dev,suid,rw 1 2
>
> /dev/hdb1 /storage1 ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hdb5 /storage2 ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hdb6 /storage3 ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hdb7 /storage4 ext2 defaults 1 2
>
> It's storage1 and storage 4 that *have* to be left aslone for now.
>
> Thanks for the help in advance!
>
>   
There is an "expert" mode during install that lets you pretty much do 
what you want.  Use existing partions with or without formatting, delete 
partitions, etc.  I don't recall exactly what it's called but it's 
pretty obvious.  Just don't use the "default" settings when it comes to 
partitioning.  ;)  In any case, it won't do anything until you approve 
of what it is about to do.

Jim.