Upgrade Suggestions

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I’m now ready to move to 11.2 from 11.1. I’ve put 11.2 on a couple of other machines as fresh installs, so that’s not a big deal.

What I’m dealing with here is upgrading my main box from 11.1 to 11.2. It currently has some funky partitioning (don’t ask why) that I’d like to clean up a bit, however I want to make sure that I don’t loose any current application settings after the upgrade.

My current part table is (HW RAID 1) :

p1 /boot 132 MB
p2 /swap 4 GB
p3 100 GB (not used - empty)
p4 logical pointer
p5 / 20 GB
p6 /home 100 GB
p7 /virt 240 GB (a repository for VM images)

I’d like to: a) combine p3 & p5; b) then move some of the /virt space to /home.

I realize that if I can accomplish a), I will have enough room to temporarily move things around.

So the real issue becomes, how would you suggest that I upgrade to 11.2 without loosing my current settings and accomplishing part a) above? :\ :\

All suggestions appreciated. I can think of a few caveman techniques to accomplish this, but I am sure that some one has probably done this before with a more eloquent method that is also a less fault prone.

TIA !

2

(1) What sort of server applications do you run on that?

(2) It is not possible to merge p3 and p5 without re-partitioning. This is because p3 is a primary partition and p5 is part of an extended partition.

3

I’m not runing any server applications per se - just more like desktop settings, browser settings, email retention files, etc.

Thanks for pointing out the logical/physical issue - I missed that one completely !!! :open_mouth: :wink:

As an addendum, I understand that this upgrade (11.1 → 11.2) is quite smooth. Any caveats that I should be aware of before I procede? This is my main workstation and of course, there is always a bit of trepidation…

4

I believe your program settings reside in your /home/you directory as
hidden files for example /home/you/.kde4 as different users will have different configurations. Be aware that certain upgrades will require that certain upgrades will require your user settings be upgraded as well. particularly a kde upgrade

5

If this is the situation, just do a clean install without touching the /home partition (p6).

As a precaution, you have to back up your /home/user with:

cp -a /home/user to-some-external-disk
6

My suggestion: perform a clean install on what you call p5, dual booting with 11.1, keeping the rest as it is. That way you can get 11.2 to work, with the possibility to fall back to 11.1

And YES, BACKUP first. Keep a copy at your desk, one at the neighbours, one at this collegue in the other side of town, and send one into orbit.

7

in fact,you can have a try magic partition manager-partition wizard to solve your trouble