[RLUG] Safely changing distros

[Mike McKay]

Boot an Ubuntu Install/Live CD. Run gparted and us it to resize your 
existing catch all partition down. Use the freed up space to create a 
new partition.

Reboot into your existing install. Mount the new partition, copy /home 
to it. Rename /home to /homeOld. Unmount new partition, then remount as 
/home.

There ya go separate home partition, ready to ported to a new distro (go 
on, you already have that Ubuntu CD)

HTH

Mike

Dennis Bagley wrote:
> Jeff,
> 
> Thanks, I sort of knew about the special partition - but you gave me 
> more details.
> 
> Unfortunately, while that will work great for some future install from 
> scratch, it doesn't help a lot
> on an existing install.
> 
> Dennis
> 
> 
> Jeff Shippen wrote:
>> If you have /home as it's own partition, no problem at all.  For 
>> example, when I first installed Linux, keeping that exact concern in 
>> mind, I set up a large partition up and set it to mount as /home, all 
>> in the partitioning stage of the install.  Now every install after 
>> that, you want to make sure to do a custom partitioning, and ensure 
>> that the partition is not formated, and again mount it to /home.  The 
>> rest of the partitions you'll probably want formated.
>> You can look up websites for partitioning guides too, but it's 
>> basically all dependent on how big your hard drive is.  If I only had 
>> a 6 gig drive, on an older PC, I would just have two partitions 
>> personally.  one for / and one for swap. If the hard drive is large, I 
>> use the number of install CDs there are as a guide to how big I would 
>> need for the / partition.  With 5 CDs, you will need at least 3.5 
>> gigs, so you might just add a couple gigs for a 6 gig partition if you 
>> were being conservative, or make it bigger if you anticipate 
>> installing large software.
>>
>> Hope that helps,
>> Jeff
>>
>> Dennis Bagley wrote:
>>> If you wanted to switch to a different distro but keep a bunch of 
>>> files you had in your home directory......
>>>
>>> Besides making backups - is there a way to install the new distro and 
>>> keep your home directory pretty much intact?
>>>
>>> (not re-format and not erase everything?)
>>>
>>> Dennis
>>>
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