Upgrading without destroying old HOME?

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

The person who installed my current Ubuntu (9.04) made a separate partition for the /home and I also have a large data partition. That person is no longer available for support.

If I upgrade to the current release (10.10?) will it identify the existing home directory and preserve it?

If not, what are the precise steps I have to follow to preserve my settings, and a lot of software that was not from the repository?

[mörgæs]

Upgrading packages that are not in the repositories is tricky, first of all because you don't know if they run in the new version.

Besides that it is a looong upgrade going all the steps from 9.04 to 10.10. I would rather install a fresh 10.10 and after that install the packages by hand.

Maybe 10.04 is actually a better option, so you can wait longer to do this over again.


Here is more on the topic:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1580857