Linux Mint Forums

Hi there,

I am a very, very happy user of a Mint 12 LXDE machine for a long time. Not a newbie but far from an expert
This machine is technically a full-blown desktop, but really acts as a "headless server" for everything I need at home, from file sharing all the way up to hosting a VM with even more services. Unfortunately for me, Mint 12 is about to reach end-of-support status, so it's time to move on. So I'm going with Mint 13, just because it's LTS and should provide me with long-term stability.

Now please bear with me as I think I have most of it figured out, but I need a sanity check from the gurus
My main concern right now is about the upgrade, which I want to approach in the safest possible way. And nothing sounds safer to me than the possibility to fully roll back in case of the unexpected. HENCE, behold the dual boot!!

The only problem I have right now is that I do not have an available partition on the main HDD (sda) where the OS should reside. This is how it looks:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 19G 3.2G 15G 19% /
/dev/sda1 92M 29M 59M 33% /boot
/dev/sda3 54G 13G 38G 26% /home
/dev/sdb1 917G 550G 368G 60% /mnt/bigdisk

My plan is as follows:
1-run a backup as indicated in How to upgrade to a newer release ("fresh" upgrade): http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2. Also backup everything in /boot/grub manually
2-boot with Mint 13 LiveDVD or USB
3-gparted, shrink sda2 to half the size, create a new partition on the newly available space (I took a hint from here: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 06#p682916 where it creates an extra partition for testing distros)
4-reboot, check my "old world" still works
5-reboot with Mint 13 LiveDVD or USB, perform a "fresh" install on new partition created in step 3
6-restore as indicated in How to upgrade to a newer release ("fresh" upgrade)
7-very possibly, recreate customizations? (cron jobs, init.d autostarted services, etc, etc...)

The good news is that I shouldn't worry too much about the /home data directory, as it's already in its own partition.

If something does go wrong, or I get lost in the way, I can restore my /boot/grub files and my "old world" should be back in business until I figure out -and correct- whatever problem I had.

Soooooo finally... DID I MISS ANYTHING????? Maybe I'm too gun-shy, but...

THANKS for your help!

bump

I feel like a broken record, repeating all this over and over and over, but still people don't read it or don't get it or don't believe it - I don't know which?

Just take a disk (or in this case perhaps a paritition) image, your choice. If it all goes wrong - restore it. Why is this so complicated? (I am not getting at you gurmint, I have said this so many times to so many people it is driving me insane )

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=124636

viking777 wrote: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=124636

"That's gold Jerry, GOLD!!"

I looked all around but had not seen that post. Perhaps I was not searching with the best keywords! Even further, I have not seen a backup approach taken so simply and effectively at the same time. Seriously, this makes my life a lot easier!! THANKS, YOU DA MAN!!