[SOLVED] Migrating Ubuntu /home partition to Mint 14 install

[jiawen]

I just installed Mint 14 Mate and would like to use my pre-existing Ubuntu 10.04 /home partition. It's a different partition from / and /boot. I changed / and /boot during the install process (/boot had been too small under Ubuntu) but didn't touch /home. I also didn't tell the installer to use the preexisting /home, nor could I figure out how to do so -- everything seemed to imply reformatting, which I didn't want to do. I've installed with the same user name. I can access the preexisting /home partition, but it isn't mounting as /home; instead, it's mounting as /media/{username}. The Mint install created a separate /home/{username} partition within /, which I don't want to use or keep. Apologies if this question has already been answered -- I couldn't find anything that seemed to directly address it.

What are my next steps? Thanks!

[DataMan]

If you have the old home mounted, then it is merely a matter of drag-dropping from the old to the new with the filemanager of choice (a 2 pane manager would make life real easy : Krusader or xfe). A word of caution is in order here. I recommend that you make copies of files / folders you are going to copy over BEFORE you copy the contents of old to new. You're dealing with settings and some settings from your old Ubuntu may be incompatible with the newly installed versions. Making copies of the new beforehand gives you a recovery point should things not go well.

-DataMan

[jiawen]

The new /home was created within the new / partition, which is not what I want: 1) I want to keep the partitions separate, for future upgrades; and 2), the / partition is only about 30 GB while my /home partition is about 300 GB, so it wouldn't even fit within /.

In the end, I just reinstalled. (Not much installed at that point anyway.) The installer program does allow for mounting old partitions without formatting, though it's a bit counterintuitive how to do so -- it required clicking the "mount" button, then clicking something else, then un-clicking "format". Kinda dangerous! It'd be better to have some clear method of mounting old partitions without automatically assuming the user wants to format them. Still, in the end, I got my old /home partition mounted as my new /home partition, and all is good. Firefox started right up in the same session I had back in Ubuntu 10.04!

[jiawen]

Is there some way to mark this topic as [SOLVED] or whatever? I don't see one. In any case, it's solved for my purposes.

[DataMan]

Go to your original post and click the edit link. In the subject of the post append a "[SOLVED]" or whatever.

-DataMan

[jiawen]

Go to your original post and click the edit link. In the subject of the post append a "[SOLVED]" or whatever.

-DataMan

I should've thought of that!