Some help with [re-]installation please

[Chris Green <chris at areti dot co dot uk>]

I had a disk disaster over the week-end, a disk 'optimiser' made my
160Gb main drive very optimal by wiping it completely.  I was fairly
well backed up etc. but it takes a while to get everything back to
normality.

I found re-installing cygwin and cygwin/X a bit confusing so would
appreciate some comments and help.

I had all the ftp'ed files left from installing cygwin previously
sitting in a directory on a networded drive, could I have used these
to re-install cygwin rather than downloading everything again?  If so
how does one do it?  There are a number of different directories, one
for each FTP site I've used.

As it was I chose an FTP site (the last one I had used I think) and
re-downloaded from there, or did I?  If I accept defaults does it just
download only the files which have been updated and install the rest
from the previously downloaded files on disk.

I really find the window where you select what to download, etc.
*very* confusing, some of the wording is very odd.  Two examples from
the User's Guide which I find difficult to understand are:-

    You can change setup.exe's view style, which is helpful if you know
    the name of a package you want to install but not which category it is
    in. Click on the View button and it will rotate between Category (the
    default), Full (all packages), and Partial (only packages to be
    upgraded). If you are familiar with Unix, you will probably want to at
    east glance through the Full listing for your favorite tools.

So what does 'Partial' mean?  I can see that Category means all
packages sorted into types, Full means all in alphabetical order but
what does Partial mean?  Does it mean only display packages that I've
got already?

... and the second (and more confusing for me) bit is:-

    Once you have an existing Cygwin installation, the setup.exe chooser
    is also used to manage your Cygwin installation. Information on
    installed packages is kept in the /etc/setup/ directory of your Cygwin
    installation; if setup.exe cannot find this directory it will act just
    like you had no Cygwin installation. If setup.exe finds a newer
    version of an installed package available, it will automatically mark
    it to be upgraded. To Uninstall, Reinstall, or get the Source for an
    existing package, click on Keep to toggle it. Also, to avoid the need
    to reboot after upgrading, make sure to close all Cygwin windows and
    stop all Cygwin processes before setup.exe begins to install the
    upgraded package.

What on earth does "To Uninstall, Reinstall, or get the Source for an
existing package, click on Keep to toggle it.", mean???

-- 
Chris Green (chris@areti.co.uk)