Migrating a laptop from one distro (openSuse 10.2) to another (FC6)

[Bayard Coolidge]

I've been around Linux a while, but my experience with laptops is minimal.

I bought a laptop recently with two SATA hardrives. The major OEM
that made the laptop very generously made the second drive "D:",
and the BIOS does NOT support booting off of the second hard drive, only off of the first drive, or a USB drive, or the built-in DVD drive. Laptop
has an AMD64 X2 Turion CPU, and an NVIDIA graphics chip set.

I installed OpenSuSE 10.2 after a bit of fussing back and forth between
it and FC6. Somewhere along the line, one of the two managed to
overwrite the MS boot block and installed Grub on the bootblock of the
primary drive. I do not know offhand if /boot/backup_mbr is really the
Microsquish boot block or a duplicate openSuSE bootblock or an FC6
bootblock because I was so careless with my testing. (I was trying to
install the system such that /boot was on a flash drive, so as not to
perturb the boot block on the "primary"/"C"/Windows drive - I failed).

So, the upshot is, I have a nicely working openSuSE installation, and
I can also boot Windows whenever I want to (which is rare). I'm toying
with the idea of "migrating" this installation to FC6. I'm perfectly willing
to spool off my /home directory (and certain other critical system
configuration files) to DVDs, and "wipe" the openSuSE bits but ONLY
if it won't screw up my Windows installation. The Fedora installation
documentation includes a blurb about migrating from FC5 to FC6,
but nothing about other Linux installations. (No, I don't want to go to
FC7, since it's still being tested - I need a stable environment, and no,
I don't want to migrate to a Debian-based installation, since I'm not as
comfortable/experienced with it as I am with SuSE and Red Hat.)

Has anyone tried this? Any particular suggestions (aside from backing
up everything, which I will anyway) on how to proceed?

TIA,

Bayard

"Brake for moose - it can save your life" - NHF&GD



 
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