My roomate Rob [1] is rebuilding his workstation that was hacked the other day. [2] He could repair it by rebuilding the damaged directories but he feels it's easier to resintall and I probably would do the same myself. There is stuff he wants to save but since Tom's RootBoot disk [3] doesn't have drivers for his network card he came in asking if I had a spare IDE drive he could borrow.
Possibly, but let's see if there is something easier first. Could he just install without formatting the disks? No, there are some configuration files he wants to save. Hmmmm … he's got this swap partition that's big enough to hold what he wants. fdisk to change it to Linux native, then mke2fs to format it. Copy the files he wants, reinstall, then afterwards, copy the files off, and turn it back to swap space.
It's what I did when I installed Linux on my laptop. [4]