I just upgraded from Slackware-14.1 to 14.2. That's almost 3 years in between. :-) Here are what I did or have... 1. Single root filesystem /dev/sda1. For boot drive, you need MBR, but you can lump everything into one partition. When upgrading, - before "install", move all the old directories into /.old - during "install", don't partition or format /dev/sda (obviously) - after "install", copy files from /.old/etc to /etc, file by file but only when necessary (more later). 2. For non-boot harddisks, use the entire harddisk without partition, like /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdb1. Yes, you can format EXT4 or BTRFS on the whole disk. 3. You can't just copy blindly from /.old/etc to /etc, because formats may be different, new options may be introduced, etc. - obviously, if files are the same, don't copy. cd /.old/etc find . -type f | while read f; do diff -q $f /etc/$f && echo $f; done find . -type f | while read f; do diff -q $f /etc/$f && rm $f; done - after that, diff and merge into /etc manually, file by file, vimdiff X /etc/X 4. If you plan to move the harddisk to another machine (like I do), then use MBR. Problem with EFI is that it writes the boot entry in BIOS. Well, on a new motherboard, boot entry is not there, so you can't boot. You have to dig into EFI shell, and manually select your .efi. -- William