About that home folder...

[Preserved_Killick]

Hi everyone,

When I installed Ubuntu for the first time a year ago, I followed some instruction to create a separate partition for a home directory. I guess it worked.

Now, I'd like to install a fresh copy of 8.10 on a reformatted partition, but not loose anything in my home partition.

Question is, how can I be certain that I've got the correct partition when it comes time to reformat?? I've got a partition with a Mountpoint of /home, but that's 186 gigs. When I look at the properties of my home directory in Nautilus, it tells me that the total space is around 105 gigs. Nothing looks to be 105 gigs in Gparted?

Here's a screenshot of Gparted:http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/UV_5c625lI-WTK7vgeXtUA

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/UV_5c625lI-WTK7vgeXtUA

How can I be sure to protect my home partition when I can't even identify it?

-Preserved

[taurus]

/dev/sda3 is your /home partition.

[Preserved_Killick]

/dev/sda3 is your /home partition.

So, I could be safe wiping out sda1 (windows boot partition),
sda2 and sda6..correct?

What I'm looking for is no more windows partition, or that fat32 sharing partiton, I just want a basic single large partition for 8.10, keep my /home partition and the linux swap partition. Sound right???

[taurus]

You can use gparted from the LiveCD to combine both /dev/sda1 & /dev/sda2 into a single large partition. And since /dev/sda6 is a logical partition, it's hard to combine that space with either primary partitions. However, you can format /dev/sda6 to ext3 and have it mount to /usr unless you want to use that space as a storage or backup.