32 to 64

[j_dog]

I understand I can not upgrade from 32 to 64. I must do a reinstall. Is that like starting over from scratch ? Will I lose all my settings and files and personalizations to the system ? How should I answer the questions about partitions.? I dont want to waste space. How is the best way to upgrade to 64 ?

[Kilz]

I understand I can not upgrade from 32 to 64. I must do a reinstall. Is that like starting over from scratch ? Will I lose all my settings and files and personalizations to the system ? How should I answer the questions about partitions.? I dont want to waste space. How is the best way to upgrade to 64 ?

Yes it is starting over from scratch. If you have enough room on your drive you may want to leave the 32bit install in place and install the 64bit to another partition. You can then slowly get the 64bit install as you like it. Once its all set, you can delete the 32bit partition.

[arvevans]

I just this afternoon completed building a new AMD X2 64-bit 3200 based system. I made a new install of the 64 bit version of Ubuntu. Then I used a 1 GB USB pen-drive to copy everything in /home/my_ID from one computer and paste it into the /home/my_ID directory in the new 64-bit machine.

This procedure brings over all the configuration files (they are usually "hidden files" in your home directory with filenames that are preceded by a ".". It also gets all your personally stored data and information that resides in your home directory and it's sub-directories.

What this will not do is copy over any added applications that are in addition to those that are loaded by default as part of the Linux install. Most of these will be in /usr/local/bin, but you may be ahead to re-install them anyway because there may be 64-bit versions that you can now use. In my case the files that I had to reload from their source included CAD programs and system tool programs for manipulating CAD program files.
_._

[jpkotta]

A good thing to do, if you can, is to always put /home in its own dedicated partition, so that it can be shared between OSes and you don't have to worry about killing it during upgrades. This applies to Windows (where it's called "Documents and Settings") as much as Linux.

I generally have the following partitions:
/boot: 100MB
/swap: 2xRAM
/: 15 GB
/home: the rest