I really need to learn how to handle usb drives. I have another thread going on a usb drive I damaged by unplugging while mounted. Now, I borked my TW install when I pulled a couple of usb drives during shutdown. TW must have gone into a maintenance mode and would not restart. Part of the problem was a display issue; meaning I could not read all the text in the cli that came up instead of booting. The suggested solutions were obscured.
After many attempts at resolving the issue, I gave up and did a fresh install. I thought I preserved my old /home with all my docs etc. but I did not. Most of my files are backed up to the cloud, so I can recover what I need. My question is: what were the steps that I missed to preserve the old files? I am sure I will mess up again and need to do a fresh install. I want to preserve as much as possible when that time comes.
When /home is on it’s own filesystem/partition, you see that that file system is not “formatted”, but only set for mounting at /home in the newly installed system.
When /home is integral to the root file system, all will be gone after a fresh install and thus must be restored, either from a copy made immediately before the new installation or from the latest backup.
So, a designated /home partition will be untouched on a re-install? Somewhere in the process, I thought there was a choice to format or not to format. I mistakenly thought that would preserve home. Going forward, I see a partition sdb5 is XFS labeled /home. So, I must look to protect that from formatting on a new install. Correct?
Just for clarity: sda is a Windows install. The install of TW works fine. Unfortunately, I lost some customizations and its been a pain getting them back.
That choice accompanies the select a mount point process. The installer will attempt to format no existing partition until the point comes that you choose to mount it somewhere. At that point if it finds that partition has a non-root filesystem it should default to do not format, but provide checkbox allowing you to select to format and which filesystem type to use if you wish it formatted. All bets are off if /home data is kept on the / partition’s filesystem instead of a separate partition’s filesystem.
It might sound a bit pedantic (and I apologize in advance for that), but next time take a piece of paper and a pencil and take notes of what you do/choose/left-as-default/etc. for each and every step (screen) in the installation process.
The advantages are many-sided:
you will train yourself in step by step thinking about what you are doing (less untidy actions);
you may even force yourself in gathering more information about the subjects that pass by and thus increase your knowledge about why you make some choices,
you will have a list of what you did last time, next time you do an installation without need to pester your memory;
you can report here with more information on what you did when you want help (the report above in post #1 being almost useless).
You can either take this as a hint, ignore it complete, or block the showing from any of my future posts to you.
It is complete up to you.
