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I have two partitions of Ubuntu installed on my Samsung N150 Plus. One is 11.04 (90GB) and one is 11.10 (60GB). All my documents are on the 11.04 home folder, but they are too big to cut and paste into 11.10.

I would like to remove the OS from 11.04 and use that partition as my home folder in 11.10. Any easy step-by-step guide on how to do this would be appreciated.

NOTE: I have a cracked screen, and cannot always see what's on the screen of my Samsung; nothing displays on my external monitor until I've already booted.

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2 Answers

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Edit: one important step was missing.

The following procedure should work:

  1. Remove the system files of 11.04 (warning: this will remove all programs and data that are not in your home folder)

    a. In 11.10, open a terminal

    b. Run sudo nautilus

    c. Mount the 11.04 partition

    d. Delete everything except your home folder from that partition

  2. Update grub

    a. Now, run sudo update-grub

    b. Reboot

  3. If you have any files in the 11.10 home, move it to the other partition (the one that was 11.04)

  4. Move the personal folders to the partition root. In the partition that will be your home folder, you need to move the folders to the partition root. If you have /media/DISK-ID/home/user, you need to move it to /media/DISK-ID/user.

    a. Open a terminal and run cd /media/YOUR-DISK-ID/home

    b. Move everything from here to the parent folder: sudo mv * ..

    c. Remove the empty home folder: cd .. ; sudo rmdir home

  5. Update you fstab

    a. Run sudo df -h

    b. See the partition name of the your new home (it must be something like /dev/sdaX where X is a number)

    c. Run sudo gedit /etc/fstab

    d. Add the following line to it:

    /dev/sdaX /home ext4 defaults 0 0

    e. Reboot

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I have done 1 it came up with "** (nautilus:1824): DEBUG: Syncdaemon not running, waiting for it to start in NameOwnerChanged Initializing nautilus-gdu extension Nautilus-Share-Message: Called "net usershare info" but it failed: 'net usershare' returned error 255: net usershare: cannot open usershare directory /var/lib/samba/usershares. Error No such file or directory Please ask your system administrator to enable user sharing.", but, I was able to delete all, except the home folder. I was able to do number 2, no problem there. – Muhammad Jan 8 '12 at 21:05
3 I wasn't able to do as it say's i haven't enough space. I have 95Gb with 72Gb home folder. – Muhammad Jan 8 '12 at 21:10
About #1: it's only a nautilus warning, no worry here. About #3: do you have 95 GB of files and the home partition has 72 GB? – Marco Biscaro Jan 8 '12 at 21:56
Its 95Gb with 72Gb of files. Properties says this, but has no available space – Muhammad Jan 8 '12 at 22:17
The home folder in 11.10 uses how many GB? – Marco Biscaro Jan 8 '12 at 22:24
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up vote 0 down vote

Removing the 11.04 installation is quite simple. You'll just log onto 11.10, mount the root filesystem of the other installation and delete everything except the home directory. Then you'll edit your grub menu to not include it. Afterwards, you can copy your data from the home folder of 11.10 onto the one from 11.04, and then use that filesystem as a home folder in 11.10.

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Thank you for replying, I had tried to delete everything from the 11.04 partition. But there is no, delete or move to Rubbish bin.. so I cannot delete them....any help on how to delete....I'll do the grub thing, when I have done the home partition thing...thanks again – Muhammad Jan 8 '12 at 17:36

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