Hi. First post on LQ. Yeah.

I have this desktop computer running Ubuntu 10.10; it has three 250G disks in a Raid-5 using mdadm. On top of this i use LVM with a number of volumes, where one is my /root partition (including /home). It's been a while since I created this installation, but I think I created the Raid before I created the volumes with LVM....

Now, I want to replace ubuntu 10.10 with either Ubuntu 10.04 (for its LTS) or Mint 11.

Is it possible to do a fresh install on the existing Raid/LVM volumes, replacing the OS but keeping the disk structure and data? Or should I just take a backup of the data and start from scratch? I just remember that I struggled a bit with the Raid/LVM combo, and that I had to use Ubuntus alternate CD for this. Mint doesn't have anything equivalent....

Appreciate any input on this.

Hi Arn

I vaguely remember that indeed Mint hasn't added LVM support. The only I truly remember is that when I setup Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server edition. This one has LVM setup support right into the installation stage.

So speaking of choice, IMHO it's a bit limited. But since there's a chance you did downgrade (10.10 to 10.04, right?), I suggest to do full data backup and start over from scratch. That way, you could start fresh.