whats the best way to update from very old breezy to current without dataloss?

[strider3700]

Yes I'm a crappy admin. I haven't updated my machine in around a year as best I can figure and it's still running some mix of breezy components.

I'm currently downloading 7.10 and wanting to update but I didn't place my home folders on a seperate partition. I'm concerned if I just say go ahead and install in the same place I will lose the existing data.

Am I correct?
Whats the best way to go about this?
I suppose I could always copy the critical data off of the main partition to a different hd and start over but that seems like a pain.

Thanks

[Fintan]

Re: whats the best way to update from very old breezy to current without datalos

AFAIK there is no way to directly upgrade from breezy to Gutsy. So you can either use gparted live cd to make a separate partition and copy your data to that partition and install gutsy.
Having a separate /home partition is good and sensible practice anyway

Or you could wait for hardy to be released. Hardy is supposed to be able to keep your existing /home intact while installing. For more on hardy:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...seen#msg103706

[Rog131]

Re: whats the best way to update from very old breezy to current without datalos

As Fintan said: It is good to have more than one partition.

RecommendSeparateHome
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecommendSeparateHome

Rationale

Having a separate partition for /home is always a good idea, since it lets you reinstall your system without losing valuable personal data. This can be especially useful in a distro like Ubuntu, where users have the chance to upgrade their install quite often (every six months) and might want to perform a clean install to avoid potential problems. Nevertheless, and while some other distros out there already do this automatically, Ubuntu doesn't.

How to: Create a separate home partition in Ubuntu
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/separatehome

Introduction
This guide is for creating a separate /home partition if you already installed Ubuntu without a /home partition (i.e., /home is just a folder inside your / partition).

=> I would: 1) Make separate home (and data partitions).
2) Make clean installation.

[strider3700]

Re: whats the best way to update from very old breezy to current without dataloss?

Ok thanks, I now have a seperate home partition at /dev/hda3

Now my next question I'm attempting to do a clean install. when I boot from the live CD and go through the install program step 4 of 6 is prepairing the disk space. I just want to do the install over the old one at /dev/hda1 so hda1 becomes /

step 4 gives me the option of taking free space, using an entire disk, guided using the largest free space or manual.

So I tried manual since the first 3 are not what I want.

If I goto /dev/hda1 and try to say format it and mount it as / I get an error

"File system was not cleanly unmounted! You should run e2fsck.
Modifying an unclean file system could cause severe corruption."

Now being that I booted from the live cd I didn't think my old / would be mounted. any advice on how best to go about unmounting and cleaning it?

[Fintan]

Re: whats the best way to update from very old breezy to current without datalos

The easiest way is to just delete that partition and recreate it. Then format it as you wish and give it /.

[Rog131]

Re: whats the best way to update from very old breezy to current without datalos

"File system was not cleanly unmounted! You should run e2fsck.
Modifying an unclean file system could cause severe corruption."

Now being that I booted from the live cd I didn't think my old / would be mounted. any advice on how best to go about unmounting and cleaning it?

You could start session with live CD and run fsck.

man fsck

FSCK(8) FSCK(8)

NAME
fsck - check and repair a Linux file system

SYNOPSIS
fsck [ -sAVRTNP ] [ -C [ fd ] ] [ -t fstype ] [filesys ... ] [--] [ fs-
specific-options ]

DESCRIPTION
fsck is used to check and optionally repair one or more Linux file sys‐
tems. filesys can be a device name (e.g. /dev/hdc1, /dev/sdb2), a
mount point (e.g. /, /usr, /home), or an ext2 label or UUID specifier
(e.g. UUID=8868abf6-88c5-4a83-98b8-bfc24057f7bd or LABEL=root). Nor‐
mally, the fsck program will try to handle filesystems on different
physical disk drives in parallel to reduce the total amount of time
needed to check all of the filesystems.

=> In the konsole ( unmounted partition):

 sudo fcsk /dev/hda1

With live CD sudo is empty/passwordless, just press enter when it asks password.

[strider3700]

Re: whats the best way to update from very old breezy to current without datalos

Thanks everyone.

In the end I made a new empty chunk of HD space and installed the root to there. This lets me boot back into the old system and look at things when needed for the moment.

I've had a shiny new system for a couple of days now and well frankly it's pretty much the same as the old except everything works. Stable and fast so far. Now I just need to get everything reinstalled. The next big thing will either be flash in mozilla so that Youtube works again or maybe my missing drives mounted. I think the missing drives is because they are on a seperate controller card.