16
7
I've been considering migrating my laptop from Ubuntu to Debian. I didn't set up a separate home partition. Is it as easy as just installing Debian over Ubuntu?
16
7
I've been considering migrating my laptop from Ubuntu to Debian. I didn't set up a separate home partition. Is it as easy as just installing Debian over Ubuntu?
14
First thing first, move that home directory to a new partition. It's really not that difficult to do (I made the same mistake, took ~30 min to do, most of it copying). I'll give you a simple step-by-step, but more detailed walkthroughs are available.
sudo mount /dev/sda3 /media/disk
rsync
or cp
for this, but cp
worked fine for me (using the -a
flag as nagul pointed out to maintain file permissions and ownership).
sudo cp -a /home /media/disk
/etc/fstab
file and create a new entry for /dev/sda3
and set its mount point as /home
.sudo mv /home /home_old
/dev/sda3
to /home
or just reboot the computer.After you have /home on its own parition, changing your distro is incredibly simple. Just download a live cd and/or an installation disk for the distribution you want and install it on the same partition hosting your current distro (or on a seperate partition for multi-boot purposes).
Then, after you have the distro installed, just follow steps 4-6 again (if the options for a custom /home
partition weren't available in the installer). Now you have all your old files, settings, etc but with a brand new shiny distro.
2
An over-the-top upgrade will not work.
Before you do anything else, backup your data (though that should go without saying).
Then you could:
/home
a synlink to /home
on the old partition.or
/home
from backup
4You should investigate using
cp -a
if you want to retain permissions and ownership info. – None – 2009-09-11T17:28:47.063OR, move the /home directory to a different physical drive, which is what I do. – djangofan – 2009-09-11T17:35:53.447