copying home directory from fiesty to hardy install fails to transfer settings

[genbuntu]

Hi

I just made a clean install of Hardy ( with windows xp partition intact ). Previously I was using feisty (dual-boot with XP) .

From what I had researched , I was convinced that preserving a copy of all the contents in my feisty /home directory and then pasting it into the new (Hardy's) /home directory would provide me with my original settings .
However, after doing this , Ubuntu fails to load anything (except a xchat window , which I set to load at startup in my previous feisty installation as well). It does not even load the panels at top and bottom , neither can I see any icons . But if I choose the fail-safe gnome session then it loads ,to some extent, some of the customization from my previous feisty install viz. panel icons , desktop files etc.. but I cannot start firefox , pidgin , use xchat etc.

What am I doing wrong? Why am I not able to successfully migrate my settings from previous (feisty) version to the newly installed Hardy and make it load successfully ?

N.B. : I had replicated the packages using "sudo dpkg --set-selections < my-packages && sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade" command before I copied the contents of the /home directory.

EDIT: oops! I just realized I made a spelling mistake in the title , should have been feisty instead of fiesty. Any moderator may change that pls. thx.

[genbuntu]

So then I tried another idea : to copy home directory into a separate partition and then install Hardy over it , but that does not help either and it refuses to load the desktop/panels.

Eventually, I made a clean install (formatted all ext3 partitions) and am now in the process of copying relevant settings one by one whenever needed. For e.g. I copied Mozilla's directory and got my bookmarks etc back . Same with Pidgin and other programs I can think of now.

Its a tough approach but on the bright side I can get rid of all the extras I had previously which I don't need now .

[HHelsinger]

Can someone explain why just copying the /home directory wasn't sufficient. I thought that that, and perhaps also copying the /etc directory was all that would be needed. I'm reluctant to do a clean install until I understand this, and know how to replicate my current settings.

thanks.

[PaulGrahamRaven]

I'm curious about a similar upgrade path - in my case Gutsy to Hardy.

Three partitions: 50GB /root, 148GB /home, 2GB /swap.

The reason I installed it that way is because the partitioning guides I had read suggested that having /home as a separate partition meant the actual core O/S could be upgraded with files and settings retained. Is this correct, and if so what's the best course of action?

The HardyUpgrades page in the community docs suggests the network upgrade is recommended, but I've seen countless threads and posts here suggesting that a clean install is better. Which is correct?