need help with upgrade from 17.3 to 18.3 properly?

[vl1969]

Hi all,

here is my situation, I am running 17.3 on my main home PC.
last night I replaced MB/CPU and RAM on it. just had a nice AMD FS8350 8 core CPU and MB with 16MB ram left over from some project a while back and decided they would do more good in my main PC than laying around doing nothing,
so swapped it and boot up in my existing setup just fine.

also come across an extra SSD and decided to install Mint 18.3 Cinnamon on it.
still playing with it and like what I see.

so the $64,000 question is ... how do I properly move my old setup onto this new install?

I have :
old setup is 240GB ssd with Linux mint 17.3 on it. custom partitioned using BTRFS
partitioned as
"/" partiiton = 50GB BTRFS botable
"/home" = 180GB BTRFS

new setup is 240GB SSD default setup. installer using full disk.

what would be an easy way to move all to new setup?

WFY: since I used new disk I will keep the current install for a while until I am satisfied that all is working. so if I screw up I can re do install and try again.
I can boot into either setup and connect second drive after boot, so not sure if I need LiveCD boot

thanks. V.

[Moem]

I would copy the entire /home partition over from the old disk to the new disk. Or maybe you can keep it on the old disk but still mount it as /home when booting from the new disk. But I have no experience doing that.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'not sure if I need LiveCD boot'. What is that?

[catweazel]

... SSD ... BTRFS

I'd be very cautious with BTRFS on an SSD. It can be quite aggressive and may shorten the life of your SSD considerably.

[Faust]

.... Or maybe you can keep it on the old disk but still mount it as /home when booting from the new disk. But I have no experience doing that.
....

Yes , it works just fine .
I'm currently dual booting 17.3 and 18.3 and it saves a heap of grunt work in getting stuff that I want from my treasured 17.3 system .

[vl1969]

thanks everyone.

here is some more info:

... SSD ... BTRFS

I'd be very cautious with BTRFS on an SSD. It can be quite aggressive and may shorten the life of your SSD considerably.

catweazel >> I am not installing new setup on BTRFS. that was my current install of 17.3. not sure how aggressive BTRFS is with SSD but I was playing with the file system at the time and want it to try it out. it worked and worked well so I just keep running it.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'not sure if I need LiveCD boot'. What is that?

Moem>> most help when moving from one distro to another says to use a LiveCD as a tool for copying system files that otherwise would be looked out on live system, thus I mentioned it.
but in my case I have an absolutely independent installs so I do not see any issue booting into one and copy from the second disk.


Faust >> I am not interested in dual-booting thanks.
I actually want to migrate from old setup to new one.
do not mind reinstalling apps a new as I want to clean up in the process as well.


so, if I understand all of your responses I can
Option 1:

#1. boot into my new 18.3 install
#2. connect the old SSD and mount it.
#3. copy everything in my old "/home" partition to the new install "/home" folder. I did not partitioned the new setup so it is a folder on "/"
#4. reboot.
#5. reinstall apps as needed.


or Option 2
copy all data from my home onto my data disk and just reinstall apps as needed on new setup.

which maybe a cleaner option.

[austin.texas]

#3. copy everything in my old "/home" partition to the new install "/home" folder. I did not partitioned the new setup so it is a folder on "/"

When configuring a new installation, copying everything is not a good idea. There are some hidden configuration files in the new installation that you don't want to replace with the old ones.
You have to be selective about importing the old configuration (hidden) files.
For example, I have GIMP configured the way I want it, with a special theme, etc. I can import that configuration, just by copying the old /home/myusername/.gimp-2.8 folder.
The same thing works for Firefox, T.Bird, Chrome, and other programs that you have configured. But you have to pick and chose which you want, and test to see if they work right...

It is very laborious to install the additional programs that you want, if you do that one at a time. The easy way to do it is to make a single command which installs all of your desired programs at once. Like this:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get -y --show-progress install  album asunder bluefish boot-info-script clipit converseen cthumb dconf-tools  filezilla fsarchiver geany gimp gnome-brave-icon-theme gnome-search-tool google-chrome-stable gparted gpick grml-rescueboot grsync gsmartcontrol htop imagemagick-doc inkscape leafpad libdvd-pkg medit meld mint-meta-codecs multisystem nemo-image-converter openshot pinta puddletag seamonkey-mozilla-build shutter smartmontools smplayer smtube soundconverter swapspace vlc xsane