I've finally gotten that Debian Sarge installation of mine working great, with ONE exception -- nVidia drivers. I'm not really worried about that one just yet, though...

What I AM interested in doing NOW is making a backup of the install, so that I don't have to download everything (or configure it, but that's optional since I know HOW to do it now).

Is there a way to either ghost the installation, or backup everything to my storage drive? Like I said, I'd prefer to ghost it, but a package backup would be fine too. Which folder contains all the packages that I've downloaded thru apt and synaptic? What procedures do I need to do to make it happen (for ghosting). Anything ELSE that I should be aware of, like how to restore it (etc, etc...).

Thanks for any help the community can provide.

Compress your whole / (root) directory in a tar.gz file.
If you need to restore afterwards, just extract the tar.gz backup to /.

You will only have problems if partion names change between making the backup and restoring, but that would be quite simple to solve anyway (just fix /etc/fstab and maybe reinstall grub/lilo).

And you can use any bootable cd to extract the tar.gz to / right
would HD format matter?
Sorry BetaguyGZT I was also curious

Cool. Thanks for the tip. That's easy enough to do....I shoulda thought of that.

Yes, you can use a livecd to extract it.

I would keep the same filesystem just in case, but it should work anyway as long as the new filesystem is supported by the kernel.

Next time you're running sarge you might wanna look at.......................
http://home.comcast.net/~andrex/Debian-nVi...stallation.html

I'd go with installation step #2 module-assistant.