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Date:      Fri, 16 Mar 2007 11:17:55 -0400
From:      Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@msu.edu>
To:        Drew Jenkins <drewjenkinsjr@yahoo.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Corrupted OS
Message-ID:  <20070316151755.GH75446@gizmo.acns.msu.edu>
In-Reply-To: <683651.79176.qm@web62210.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
References:  <683651.79176.qm@web62210.mail.re1.yahoo.com>

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On Fri, Mar 16, 2007 at 05:09:15PM +0700, Drew Jenkins wrote:

> 23Hi;
> Is it possible to rebuild an OS without reformatting the hard drive? I 
> have FBSD6.2, so I can't upgrade.

I am not sure just what you are trying to avoid.
First of all, strictly speaking, when installing FreeBSD you never
format or reformat the hard-drive.  That is a much lower level
operation.  FreeBSD and all other OSen use the factory format
unless you do something unusually drastic.

Doing fdisk/bsdlabel/newfs is not technically 'formatting' the drive
but rather building slices, partitions and filesystems on the drive.

Now.   You do not have to redo the fdisk, bsdlabel and newfs to
wipe out and reinstall things, but why not do them?   They take
very little time.    The only reason I could think of would be if
you have a lot of your own files you don't want to nuke.  But, in
that case, the better course of action would be to back them up
somewhere safe and do the complete reinstall from scratch and then
bring your own files back.

////jerry

> TIA,
> Drew
> 
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