I want to retain the data and upgrade to Mint 18-Cinnamon with out 2 home directories. I am newb as far as partitioning so any tips, advice or instruction is greatly appreciated.

Back up your data to somewhere else and perform a full install of version 18.

One way to do this is to buy a new drive, install on that new drive and then take the data from your old drive.

As far a partitioning, having a separate partition for /home is a great idea, in fact I prefer that to be an entirely separate drive. Hence you could install all onto a new drive and then alter things and make your old drive be mounted as /home.

Hi:

First make a backup of course before an upgrade or fresh install.

There are a few ways that you can upgrade from LM 17.3 to LM 18 here:
https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

I never use the upgrade command. Instead I perform a fresh installation each time.
Sometimes upgrades don't go well and things don't work properly or become buggy.

Partitioning is pretty easy once you understand the partition manager.
During the installation the partition manager will show you all of the partitions on your machine.
Make sure you have the correct hard disk drive selected and partition accordingly.
You will need to create a EXT 4 journaling file system partition and than create a swap partition of 1 GB.

http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-parti...ll-linux-mint/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWXtVkA-S6g

Take your time and Good luck!-

Zzo0o0zZ,

As others have strongly advised, you MUST backup all your data before doing a new installation, regardless of the partitioning method used etc.

This may help you:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-distro-37074/

2 backups are even better