Backing up before a reinstall
 

Have been running Ubuntu 7.04 for the last 9 months or so, and it has been a fairly pleasant experience though not without its head-rubbing, hair-pulling technical nightmares.

To cut the long story short, I`ve destroyed X and after dabbling with many solutions i've not been able to fix it.... Please dont offer ideas for fixing X, ive tried a few and im bored. So i'm looking at a re-install, and i wanna try a new distro ==== i'm going for PCLOS ===

How can i install PCLOS and maintain my entire HOME directory intact? i have a 80 Gig partition for my Ubuntu Home directory, but i when i run the PCLOS installer its starts talking about formating that partition and i get all nervous and abort. Ideally i want PCLOS to basically take over from ubuntu and use that Home directory as its own.

Thanks Joe


Ps... i obviously am going to back up everything important first.

PPS.... i realise that my subject isnt exactly accurate.. i ended up asking a different question to the one i had originally planned.
SOrry.

I highly recommend that you not try to install a new OS over an old OS. Instead set up a new partition someplace and install the new OS in the new partition. When the new OS is stable you can copy the old home and any other data you need from the old partition to the new. After everthing in the new OS checks out and is backed up then you can wipe out the old partition and use it for something else (a seperate home partition perhaps?)

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Steve Stites

when you go to reinstall, instead of deleting all partitions, there should be an option to partition manually.

choose this option. I am not sure exactly how PCLOS's manual partition tool is set up, but make sure your old /home partition is not getting formatted, and its mount point is /home. then have it format your / partition and mount at /, and format your swap and mount as swap. then you should be good to go.

Most distributions permit you to enter a Advanced Partition editor during installation. Within this you will be able to remove/reuse all partitions, except the home directory.