Saving Data on Re-install/Firewire Detection?

[Brett Kirksey]

I'm going to do a re-install tonight for test purposes, but I would like to keep a lot of the configuration changes and preferences I have already set. Is there anyway to do this on the re-install? If not, I'd like to at least do a back up, but right now, Ubuntu isn't "seeing" my external firewire drives. Any solutions on getting Ubuntu to detect external firewire drives on a B&W G3?

Thanks
Brett