COMPLETELY fudged up my system: Can I reinstall without losing data?

[antdgar]

My filesystem (software RAID 0):

Filesystem...... Size....... Used....... Avail....... Use%....... Mounted on
/dev/md1........ 9.7G....... 2.8G....... 6.5G....... 31%....... /
tmpfs........ 999M....... 0....... 999M....... 0%....... /lib/init/rw
udev........ 10M....... 2.7M .......7.4M....... 27%....... /dev
tmpfs....... 999M....... 0 .......999M....... 0%....... /dev/shm
/dev/md3....... 901G....... .......744G....... 112G....... 87%....... /home

I don't have physical access to this machine. It is in a data center.

Can I reinstall the OS without losing the data in /home?
I can reinstall the OS. But my question is if there's a way to keep the /home directory and its data?

[bergfly]

Your /home is separate to the root so you are in luck. All you need to do is reinstall into the /dev/md1 partition. When you get to the partitioning part of the installer, do it manually and select /dev/md1 as your /, and format this, then select /dev/md3 as your /home and you will be gold. Do not check the format this partition box for /home, obviously! You may have some issues if you have many users in the /home folder as you will need to recreate them, but as long as you use the same main user, you should have access to fix this.

[pricetech]

It's still best to back up the contents of the home folder if that's possible.