Reinstallation solved

[rcdeacon]

I am preparing myself to reinstall Mint 4.0 on my Acer Aspire laptop. I have another distro at the front of the drive which I will be removing using gparted (deleting partitions). Once the other partitions are deleted I will reinstall. Can I retain my current "home" partition so that I won't have to reinstall virtualbox and some of the other enhancements I have installed? Are there directions posted or available somewhere? Thanks.

[Husse]

Of course you can keep your home - but I don't recall a specific step by step instruction in the forum. The important thing is to use manual partitioning and set the mount point for home to /home and not mark it for formatting. I came from the Windows world fairly recently and I am still baffled by how easy it is to reinstall - all the settings are retained in home (Including the name on the "menu button")
So make a root ( / ) partition of about 10 GB and a swap partition (about 1 GB) in addition to your home partition.
You may get some problems with the partitioning structure if home is is sitting "in the middle" of the disk. Swap wants to be in an extended partition and you may not be able to extend that as you wish.
If you want more assistance tell me the partitioning structure, as I notice it's a bit hard to give general advice (needs a lot of words )

[rcdeacon]

Thanks once again Husse. I will attempt this a little later in the day.

[rcdeacon]

I managed to give myself a Christmas present this year. I wiped my lappy and did a fresh install of Mint 4.0 and it is now a single boot machine! The first reinstall was a disaster mainly due to wireless issues but when I figured out it was better to install the restricted bcm43xx driver everything went well. The second install went flawlessly and I couldn't be happier!