Install 18.3 Cinnamon on same hard drive as 17.3

[danost]

It does seem that its time to upgrade to 18.3 cinnamon, I have 17.3 cinnamon on the same hard drive as I want to put 18.3 onto.
How to arrange to select at boot time, which version to select to boot into.
Its going to take me a week or more to put on my stuff into 18.3, and its better not to be without a computer until that is done, therefore my question.

Your help would be very much appreciated.
Thank You
Dan

[MichaelJohn]

Sorry I do not know the answer but have exactly the same problem. If the forum had upvotes I would give you an upvote!

[JeremyB]

I think the installer will offer to install Mint alongside Mint and set the Grub so that the Menu appears at boot time all on its own

[Moem]

It's pretty easy. When you run the installer from your medium with 18.3, you should be offered the option to install alongside 17.3, provided there is enough empty space. If you go ahead and do that, a new entry should be written in GRUB (the bootloader) and from then on, during startup you should get the choice to boot either 17.3 or 18.3.

[kc1di]

First, Back UP your important data to an external media or the Cloud.
things do go wrong somtimes

[Moem]

I very much agree, that's a good point!

[danost]

Thank you very much for this information, very much appreciated.
I've read only a little about GRUB ( this is likely not the kind that I've had infest my garden )
Seems that this is installed via what you describe in your reply to me.
I'm going to give this a try, likely next week.

Thank you again
Dan

[slipstick]

Hi Dan,
I'm presently going through this same process. I have plenty of room on my hard drive, so I have installed 18.3 without removing 17.3. When I installed 17.x I set up a separate Data partition, which mounts to my home partition at boot-up. This Data partition not only has my data, but also all my e-mails - actually my entire thunderbird profile, which is linked from /home. So when I installed 18.3, I didn't have to move any data, just modify fstab and add a link to .thunderbird. My system is UEFI/gpt - I set up two partitions before installing 18.3 (20 GB for / and only 10 GB for /home because the data is on a separate partition, with some unallocated space at the end for expansion if needed), then selected "something else" at installation and installed to these two partitions, with the bootloader installed to the ESP. GRUB automatically detected my 17.3 installation and made a menu entry for it, so at boot-up I can select either 18.3 or 17.3. This way, I can work on getting software installed to 18.3 as time permits while still mainly using 17.3. And if I am booted into 18.3, I have all my data and e-mails available without booting back into 17.3. When I install 19.x in a year or so, I will use the same process, and overlay the 19 installation over the by-that-time unused 17.3 installation.

My current partition layout is a bit complicated:
1 = ESP (EFI System Partition) 105 MB
2 = MS reserved 134 MB
3 = Windows 7 301 GB
4 = unused FAT partition 105 MB
5 = 17.3 / 21.5 GB
6 = 17.3 /home 21.5 GB
7 = Data 107 GB
8 = Linux swap 17.2 GB
9 = shared FAT (W7 & Linux) 17.2 GB
10=Timeshift backup for 17.3 105 GB
11=18.3 / 21.5 GB
12=18.3 /home 10.7 GB
13=Timeshift backup for 18.3 96.6 GB

Note - Timeshift backs up to my internal drive because I normally leave my external drive unplugged, but I have a script file that I use every couple of days to copy the Timeshift snapshots to my external drive, preserving all the hard links, so the external drive has an exact copy of what is on the internal drive backup. Home and Data get regularly backed up with Back-In-Time to the external drive, and also to a separate computer via SSH over my LAN.

[danost]

Hi Slipstick;

Your setup sounds great, from my limited perspective that is. That is my problem, to get from my level of knowledge to perhaps something approaching your level of knowledge, sigh ..... I'm sad to say that your level seems something rather remote to me at this time. If you have any thoughts on how to learn to reach your level, perhaps via home study course or online course, that would be a huge and important step up for me. Thanks again for your very kind attention to the needs of one with rather limited knowledge!

Very much appreciated
Dan

[slipstick]

I didn't plan my partition layout - it just evolved over time. If I had known at the beginning how I was going to do it, I might have done some things a little differently, but overall I'm happy with it.

I'm certainly not on an advanced level - there are a number of people on this forum who know way more than I do - read the forum regularly and you'll get a good idea of who they are. My knowledge is limited mostly to those areas that I've had to learn about from necessity - there are many areas that I am completely ignorant of. And reading the forum posts regularly is one way to advance your knowledge. I've also done some reading - one book I recommend if you want to learn the command line is "The Linux Command Line" by William Shotts, available here as a free pdf download:
http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php
I learned a lot from "A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux" by Mark G. Sobell, but the last (fourth) edition was published in 2015 and it doesn't cover systemd, so it's a bit out of date, though most of the other info is still useful - worthwhile if you can find a used copy cheap.

And, of course, there's a ton of info for free on the web - here's just a few sites to check out:
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/Home
https://www.dedoimedo.com/linux.html

Some that I've been reading recently:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html
https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/01/2 ... work-then/
https://blog.uncooperative.org/blog/201 ... partition/

And I could recommend many more - also, don't forget to check the tutorial section of the forum.

[danost]

Excellent, thank you very much !
These books will certainly keep me off the streets and out of mischief for quite some time .....
Dan