Never dealt with Linux distro upgrade before--be gentle!

[rlindsey0]

Hi, I've been using Daryna for a few months now (in a dual boot with XP Pro), and I like it a lot. I'm thinking of upgrading to Elyssa, but I don't want to put myself in a situation where I mess up what I've got and have to spend hours, days, or weeks getting things back to where they should be.

First, note that I have a 200GB HDD, of which about 73.6 GB is WinXP Pro and the rest is Daryna. On the advice of the consultant I was talking to at the time, I did NOT make a separate partition for /home (he said he'd encountered problems with those getting corrupted). That may or may not have been a good decision, but nevertheless, it's the decision that was made and the one I'm stuck with.

So, some questions:

1. If I do a clean install of Elyssa, will it only look at the current Mint partition and write over that, or will it be tempted to overwrite my XP install as well? Will I have to resize the partitions again?

2. I've already bought and installed some Linux software--Crossover Office and Moneydance. I've also installed one Windows program via Crossover--Mozart, a music notation program. If I do a clean install, what's going to happen to these programs? Will I have to install all over them again? If I backup my /home folder, do a clean Elyssa install, reinstall these three programs, then copy the relevant data files back into my new /home folder, will that do the trick?

3. I tried installing mintbackup, but it only gives me an error message. Also, there seems to be no option to determine where the backup should go (I'd like it to go to my external USB Seagate HDD). Can I just copy the /home folder contents to me external HDD manually?

4. How dangerous is a simple upgrade as opposed to a clean install? I sure would rather keep things as they are and upgrade the OS "underneath," as it were. Or perhaps the better choice is not to upgrade at all....

[rlindsey0]

Never mind, I just did a clean install of Elyssa, reinstalled all my software, and copied the contents of my old /home folder. Seems to work fine.

[Fred]

rlindsey0,

You might want to try my back-up script. Especially if you have a lot of data to try to keep up with.

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopi ... 42&t=12988

Fred