Before doing a clean install upgrade, I am checking the partitions installed. Below is what I have.

$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1000M 0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2 8:2 0 1000M 0 part /boot
├─sda3 8:3 0 97.7G 0 part /
├─sda4 8:4 0 823.6G 0 part /home
└─sda5 8:5 0 8.3G 0 part [SWAP]

SDA1 is formatted as FAT32
SDA2 as ext2

The other two are ext4s

I plan NOT to reformat /home but I am wondering about the first two partitions and whether they MUST be formatted that way. Anyone have any idea?

(Yes, I contacted the guy who built the machine but so far no answer.)

Thanks, all.

Cecilieaux

It's a little odd to have an EFI partition without Windows. If you're not running Windows, you can generally shut off all of that EFI stuff and install normally.

No need for a separate boot partition, and definitely no need for it to be ext2. Whether or not you want a separate /home is up to you. With the speed of external SSDs you can now backup/restore the entire home directory in a few minutes, so I've stopped separating out /home on my machines...more hassle than it's worth.

My usual thing lately is to have just one ext4 partition /dev/sda1 for everything. If I want to do a "clean" install, I just use a liveCD to move all of the current contents into "/oldstuff" and then do a Debian install where I tell it to keep the current contents (rather than reformat first).

For a large drive full of data, this is a lot faster than making an extra backup somewhere (I do mean extra backup, because all of the data I care about already has at least one backup somewhere).

Not every flavor of Linux provides the option to install without reformatting, though. I do it my way because I'm always installing Debian or maybe a sufficient Debian-like distribution.

Then, after I do the fresh install, I have access to all of the old files in "oldstuff", which is convenient for transferring over various settings (such as ssh keys).