getting ready to install 19 over 17.3...

[bad medicine]

...as soon as I get another flash drive, because my dog chewed the one with the 19.1 image on it.

I have what my signature says:

Thinkpad T410 i5 2.4 Ghz 4GB (actually 8GB now)
Dual boot Mint Cinnamon 17.3 64-bit, Windows 7
kernel 3.13.0-37-generic x86_64 (64 bit)

My disk looks like this:


I've copied everything important from my HOME folder, and just to be safe I have backed up everything on dev/sda5, a storage partition that I use for both W7 and Linux, even though I don't plan to change that partition. I plan to just install Mint 19 into dev/sda7 where 17.3 is now, and hopefully installation will leave everything else alone.

Sound good? Anything I forgot?

[bad medicine]

sorry about the wonky image code, maybe a mod can fix that...

[AndyMH]

Should be fine, just choose 'something else' during install and point the installer at your current / partition tell it to use it for / and reformat it. Can't remember if you also have to tell it to use the existing swap partition or whether it finds it automatically.

[bad medicine]

Should be fine, just choose 'something else' during install and point the installer at your current / partition tell it to use it for / and reformat it. Can't remember if you also have to tell it to use the existing swap partition or whether it finds it automatically.

Is the installer going to identify it as / or dev/sda/7? I don't want any confusion once I get in there.

[athi]

Should be fine, just choose 'something else' during install and point the installer at your current / partition tell it to use it for / and reformat it. Can't remember if you also have to tell it to use the existing swap partition or whether it finds it automatically.

Need to tell the installer exactly where /, swap, /home is to be in the new install. Just don't check the format check box if you want to keep your data. Do not forget to backup all data that you want to keep, just in case you get fat fingered or have a twitch.

[athi]

Should be fine, just choose 'something else' during install and point the installer at your current / partition tell it to use it for / and reformat it. Can't remember if you also have to tell it to use the existing swap partition or whether it finds it automatically.

Is the installer going to identify it as / or dev/sda/7? I don't want any confusion once I get in there.

In the installer you select the partition, click Change, check/not check format and pick /, swap, /home etc. from the pull down menu.

[Moem]

sorry about the wonky image code, maybe a mod can fix that...

I did what I could, you sure made a mess there by trying to use HTML...

[bad medicine]

Well....wait a minute. That dev/sda4 extended partition is just sitting there doing nothing, I believe. But I am pretty fuzzy on this sort of thing so I'll need someone to dumb it down for me. Can I just install 19 there instead of on top of 17? Do I need to create a logical partition first, or??? Pretty fuzzy on that sort of thing too...everything I know I learned in the last 5 minutes.

[Moem]

Well....wait a minute. That dev/sda4 extended partition is just sitting there doing nothing, I believe.

No, it's not; it's a container partition containing your current Linux partitions sda5, 6 (swap), and 7. If you install Mint 19 there, you will be installing it on top of the current 17.3 installation.

[AndyMH]

With an MSDOS or legacy partition table there is a limit of four partitions (the partition table has to fit within the first 512 bytes on the disk and provide some space for the bootloader, so not a lot of space). To overcome this limitation an extended partition (which is one of your four primary partitions) allows you to create logical partitions inside it. This is what you have got. It's called legacy because it has been superseded by the GPT partition table. This takes up more space at the beginning of the disk but allows you to have up to 128 primary partitions. But, don't think about changing what you have, it works. The drives in most of my PCs have legacy partition tables.

[gittiest personITW]

...as soon as I get another flash drive, because my dog chewed the one with the 19.1 image on it.

Have you tried this:
https://uk.pedigree.com/our-products/ca ... medium-56x


I'm just a spectator on this post from now on. Sorry.

[bad medicine]

...as soon as I get another flash drive, because my dog chewed the one with the 19.1 image on it.

Have you tried this:
https://uk.pedigree.com/our-products/ca ... medium-56x


I'm just a spectator on this post from now on. Sorry.

Ha! My dog demolishes those in minutes!

But I decided to just buy a new laptop since I've been having issues with this one anyway. I will do a fresh install there and will have this machine with 17.3 as a backup and eventually will just use it for Windows which I rarely use anyway