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Galen.Terranova
May 17th, 2009, 01:14 PM
Hi All,

Am on Dell Dimension E510 with dual-boot WinXP & 8.04 LTS looking to upgrade to 9.04... Long story short: After reading some of the horror stories that you have been struggling with, I have a few upgrade options:

1) Don't
2) Upgrade to 8.10 then 9.04
3) Fresh install 9.04
4) Clone 8.04 then upgrade 8.10, then 9.04

While all of these have their attractions, I am leaning toward option (4). If the upgrade goes bad at any time I still have my working 8.04... But my concern now is how to keep the upgrade from changing the kernel information in grub... It seems to me that you should, in theory, be able to have as many working Linux distros as you have space for, or am I making an erroneous assumption here? It is exactly that issue, with grub and booting that holds me back from playing around with other flavors of Linux.

If I bring up gparted, I see that I have 234 GB unallocated... that's enough for a dozen Linux installations. So I guess I am looking for a pointer to a thread or document that I can use as a guide to the clone and upgrade strategy. Has anyone done this successfully? Is there some detailed guide to gparted and start-up manager that I can build a procedure from?

My biggest concern is the potential of losing data, as I am not backed up here... and while that is a huge concern of mine, that is a subject for another thread.

Thanks to all for this great operating system and your support.

Regards, Bob

jerrrys
May 17th, 2009, 01:40 PM
#5...just try the live cd without installing...i started with 810, both gnome and kde...didnt work for me, ended up with 804...theres too many horror stories out there about upgrades and you got to do it twice...