So, as I said, I'm gonna convert to Ubuntu. But to do this, I want to wipe my HDD, and start again (my swap partition is to small to use software suspend, and there's a stray 10Gb missing somewhere - df and du don't agree). So, I need some tools to work out what's going on. So, I can make an ext3 filesystem on my firewire drive by doing: mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda3 So, next I need to backup my data. This should be relatively straight-forward, if whacky. I plan to boot into another Linux. Hey, why not go into the Ubuntu live CD (assuming it can handle firewire)? Mount my HDD, say to /mnt/debian, then to back it all up: tar -czf /mnt/firewire/home.tgz /mnt/debian/home/upayavira tar -czf /mnt/firewire/root.tgz /mnt/debian/ --exclude /home/upayavira And that should have my backups. How long it will take though, that's a different question!