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I have an external hard drive, with a few partitions on it.

Because I have a bootable version of Ubuntu 12.04 on it, I have all of the standard Linux partitions on it, as well as one called Data (which contains other data that I want preserved). Today, I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10, which seemed to have messed up my installation. Whenever I tried to boot Ubuntu, I got a black screen with a simple insertion cursor on the top left corner. After some searches, I found that this was an error with the GUI-portion of Ubuntu.

Using the terminal, I reinstalled ubuntu-desktop and unity, but I still am unable to access the desktop. I had planned to install 13.10 after 12.10 finished upgrading, so I decided to just get rid of my previous installation, and replace it with 13.10.

I have a LiveUSB with (bootable) Ubuntu 13.10 on it, so I want to install that onto my hard drive. However, I don't want to lose my Data partition.

Is this possible, and if so, how? I'm going to boot 13.10 off of my hard drive (once I install it on there), but I also have Windows 8.1 installed on my laptop.

Edit: On the installer, one of the options is "Upgrade Ubuntu 12.10 to Ubuntu 13.10". will that preserve my data and my Windows installation?

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  • Yes, the "Upgrade" option will preserve your user data . . . but never count on it. Things go wrong, and you should copy any data you want to save someplace safe first.
    – Marc
    Mar 7, 2014 at 20:20
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    @user68186 It's a full install. And Marc, I found an old laptop I had lying around. So I decided to copy all of the secure data from my "Data" partition onto my main laptop, then run the LiveUSB installer on the old laptop to install it onto my hard drive. That way, even if something goes wrong, I still have my data and my Windows 8.1 installation on my main laptop :). Mar 7, 2014 at 20:24

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So if you go into the "advanced" section of the install, you should be able to pick which partitions you want to use. If all you want to preserve is in the Data partition, then you can simply choose to format your old 12.10 partition (I recommend this over upgrading).

If you want to check the format of your partitions before starting all of this so you can get an idea of which partitions you'd be choosing, you can install gparted from the terminal (using sudo apt-get install gparted) and then run it from terminal (using sudo gparted). Sadly the partitions are not named well to the average user, so you have to know which one is your ubuntu 12.10 one, but it'll help and you don't have to decide on the spot during installation.


P.S. As a general rule, unless you don't mind accidentally wiping your whole hard drive, I would recommend not doing any of the default options in the installation guide and always going to advanced. It gives you much more control, especially if you have multiple operating systems installed.

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