Does a reinstall upend /home partition

[mailforbiz]

Hi

I have finally gathered the courage to upgrade my main laptop from 8.04 to Intrepid (I was holding off until now because I can't afford to run into issues with the new version and be stalled). The following is my partition scheme -its a dual boot because I need to have M$ exchange for a variety of reasons.

Vista (primary)
Vista (primary)
/     (primary)
/home (extended logical)
/tmp  (extended logical)
swap  (extended logical)

From what I understand, its safe for me to reformat/reinstall on /, reformat /tmp and swap (just for the heck), and leave /home alone with all of my data and applications.

Am I missing something? What all will be touched on /home if anything? I thought of backup/restore of /home but that wouldn't do much good if application directories have anyways changed from 8.04 to 8.10.


Thanks in advance,
HT

[taurus]

If you want to do a fresh install of intrepid, just follow the screen until you get to the partition part. Pick Manual option and make sure you mount the right partitions as / and /tmp. Click the check mark to format them. Now, mount whichever partition for your old /home to /home and do not format that partition or all your data will be gone. You don't have to do anything with the swap partition since the installer knows what to do with it.

[mailforbiz]

But won't some files be lost in the home directory as well because I'll need to recreate the linux user? For eg., bashrc will be lost, no? I just wanted to get some idea as to what all application data will be touched in /home by doing a reinstall this way. Ofcourse, I could find out the hard way.

If you want to do a fresh install of intrepid, just follow the screen until you get to the partition part. Pick Manual option and make sure you mount the right partitions as / and /tmp. Click the check mark to format them. Now, mount whichever partition for your old /home to /home and do not format that partition or all your data will be gone. You don't have to do anything with the swap partition since the installer knows what to do with it.

[mailforbiz]

FWIW, I reinstalled on / and /tmp and everything went just fine. I did have some missing application links on the main panel but that I'd expected. Getting my wireless and Bluetooth travel mouse working was a breeze compared to Hardy. I still have some odd issues lingering from the Hardy install but am very happy with so far as a lot of issues have been fixed eg. bluetooth mouse losing connection after sometimed. Some of the tricky issues are:

• on Resume from Suspend, the password dialog box doesn't show up after a couple of times, get either a blank screen or some messed up graphical artifacts
• streaming video on certain websites don't work eg cnn.com
• firefox *hung* once - there was a lot of scripting on the page
• gedit takes a while to load for large files

Will keep you updated on how I fare on those and other ones not discovered yet.