Migrating to Debian from SuSE?

[mikedodd]

I've been using Linux for about five years, and even though I'm not a newbie, I'm still finding my way around the system. I have a server on the home network running SUSE Linux 10, and I just installed Debian etch on a spare computer. I like what I see, and am considering installing etch on the server. I have the server set up to run Apache ( hosting a copy of my family's public Web site), Samba, for the household computers running Windows, NFS for the spare Linux box (I backup server files to a removable drive on the spare box), and a Perl home-automation application.

Naturally, I'd like to keep all this stuff if I migrate to Debian. Is it possible to install Debian using my existing partitions and create identical mount points for Deb? don't recall a place in the etch installation that offered me this option. What should I be looking for?

Is Debian's start up architecture dramatically different from SuSE, so that I would have to make massive changes to the configuration? Or is it similar, so the migration might be painless?

Thanks in advance for any information and advice.

Mike

[coopstah13]

it would be tough if you didn't format your root partition at least, but, during the install when you get to the disk setup you have to do manual configuration, from there you can pick existing partitions and assign their mount points