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I'm planning to upgrade from Quantal ( 50 GB of /, 2 GB of swap and 250 GB of /home ) to Raring when it is released. Clean install, choosing Upgrade option only give me messy display.

How do I mount my existing 250 GB /home (not encrypted), when I install Raring as my new /home?

2 Answers 2

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First. Make backups of your /home. Then make copies of important documents in a flash drive (One can never be too careful).

Second, boot the computer from Live USB/DVD and start the install process.

The installer should see the existing Ubuntu 12.10 and give you an option to upgrade from installation disk or some such thing (do not remember the exact words). This will preserve the /home partition and do a clean install. This will also try to reinstall some of the other packages you already have. Not all apps will get installed this way, as it depends on which repository they are from. Official Ubuntu repository based packages are most likely to get installed again.

When it comes to naming the primary user and creating the user ID. Use exactly the same ID you had before. This will associate the user to its old /home/[user] folder. If you have other users for this machine, recreate the IDs after installation is complete and the first reboot.

If for some reason upgrade from installation disk does not work, choose Something Else... and select the / as the install location. The mount point should be /. Check the format partition option. Make sure /home partition is not checked for formatting. As before, choose your primary user ID as the one you had before.

Hope this helps

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  • Choosing upgrade from installation disc didn't work well in my system, I'll choose Something Else. Just don't format /home and create same username, right? I'll try it. Thanks.
    – Nur
    Apr 5, 2013 at 18:00
  • Yes, not formatting /home and same username should do it. You are welcome.
    – user68186
    Apr 5, 2013 at 18:56
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You can install normally. After the install is complete, we need to know what partition is your home folder. Open the terminal and type $ lsblk. It will show your partitions. Look what of them corresponds to your home folder and note the name of the partition (sda1, sda2, etc)

Edit your fstab by executing the following command:
$ sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Then add the following line to the end of the file
/dev/sdaX /home ext4 rw,noatime,nodiratime 0 2

Where sdaX is the name of the partition you noted. Also make sure your partition is ext4. If not you need to change the ext4 entry. Then restart your computer. Your home folder should be loaded now.

NOTE: If you don't know about the terms I've used or you are beginner who doesn't like the terminal or editing text files, please go for the other answers. There are methods you may find easier. This is just the way I like to do.

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  • I'm a beginner, actually, but I guess I'm understand a bit. By install normally, do you mean I just have to re-format / and /swap partition when install Raring and leave my old /home as is?
    – Nur
    Apr 5, 2013 at 13:01
  • Yes. Reformat / and /swap should do it. But if you choose the "Something else" option when you install, you can just double click your home partition and chose the /home mount point in the checkbox and that's it. I didn't include this in the answer because I don't have the images to illustrate it.
    – Jesse
    Apr 5, 2013 at 13:06
  • Yes I choose "Something Else" for my cases. Thanks, I'll try it.
    – Nur
    Apr 5, 2013 at 17:58

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