My current SuSE 9.2 installation is messed up due to a number of reasons. I want to do a clean install. I've got dual WinXP and SuSE boot and 4 Linux partitions:
1. main one with most of dirs (on disk C
2. mounted as /home (on disk C
3. mounted as /usr (on disk D
4. swap. (on disk D

I did that after I installed SuSE last time. Originally everything was on disk C: If I want to retain them this way, how should I install SuSE. Does it have option to put directories to certain partitions? Should I remove partitions or just delete everything from them? Can I keep /home untouched? Should I then delete all .directories?

Please do not use Windows notification of your drives. The drive letter C can either mean a partition or a whole drive. You would help us a lot if you'd use hdxy, where x is a-z for numbering the drives and y is the number of your partition on the particular drive.

I think the easiest way is to keep the partitions as they are and tell yast during installation to format them. If you do not format /home, you can keep your data. Just be sure to set the mountpoints correctly.

You don't have to put directories to certain partitions, except you want to. For /home it makes sense, since you don't use your data after a system update/change. I am not sure about /usr, since most of this data will be useless after a system update.

Why would you like to delete all .directories? These are hidden folders that mostly contain your personal settings, but also some data. If you want to keep your configuration, you should keep them, otherwise they will be created with default settings.

I hope this helps!

Thanks, it does. I found it very easy actually. I reformatted / and /usr partitions and kept /home intact. SuSE picked up all my old settings without a problem for all user accounts Well, I had a slight problem because I share Firefox and Thunderbird with WinXP and in this installation SuSE assigned slightly different letters to Windrives, which caused corruption of my address book. I fixed it in fstab, so I need to reshare my address book for one acount again.

The bigger problem is that I have conflict between amaroK and xine: for some strange reason I cannot have them both installed. It is unfortunate because I use xine engine in amaroK. I think I have to downgrade amaroK and try again.

This might be a different story, but i have suse 9.2 and i want to reinstall it. What should i do?

do the same. Boot from the installation CD and run New Installation.