Retaining /home partition during installation is like balancing a pencil on its point, unless the installation presents option of whether or not to retain previous configurations and the user says NO, DO NOT; because sometimes one is only installing to be rid of those configurations that were tying the OS up in a knot. On my Asus 9rp laptop i installed so many distros, delighted to retain my home directory; but it is because of this that none of them worked; worse yet, they all added my new configurations...
