[Solved] New LinuxMint version

[M_Mynaardt]

Can someone tell me of a [relatively] painless way to upgrade to the new version of Linux mint on dual boot computer?

Even if it's slow, that's fine; I just want to avoid copying all my user files first and redoing the installation from scratch with a new version...

[StanTheMan]

You don;t say what your old version was.
But if your original set up used a data partition mounted on the directory " /home " , it is easy.
With the new installer going , when you come to the partitioning part , just carefully select your original root partition , and set it t mount on " / " and format , and set the original /home partrition as mounted on " /home " and do NOT format.
The new install will overwrite the root partition , and the /home partitiion will be unchanged.
Make sure that you spell the User name exactly the same as the original.
You will have to install some new applications and set launch icons.
Your original e-mail was in the /home partition and it will be available same as before.

[jesica]

http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

[M_Mynaardt]

You don;t say what your old version was.
But if your original set up used a data partition mounted on the directory " /home " , it is easy.
With the new installer going , when you come to the partitioning part , just carefully select your original root partition , and set it t mount on " / " and format , and set the original /home partrition as mounted on " /home " and do NOT format.
The new install will overwrite the root partition , and the /home partitiion will be unchanged.
Make sure that you spell the User name exactly the same as the original.
You will have to install some new applications and set launch icons.
Your original e-mail was in the /home partition and it will be available same as before.

Thanks, I will give that a go, now that I have a couple of days off!

[M_Mynaardt]

http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

Thanks for that, I'll give that a go in the next day or two, since I have a couple of days off work...

[Gramps50]

http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

Thanks for that, I'll give that a go in the next day or two, since I have a couple of days off work...

For saftey sake you still might want to backup your data to an external hd or something, better to be safe than sorry.

[M_Mynaardt]

Oh Bugger!


I must've done something wrong!

I thought I was following the directions nicely to upgrade LinuxMint to version 10.

However...
[*] after the first go, I went to reboot and on the dual boot option it showed Linux Mint 9; no sign of Linux Mint 10.
[*] On the second go; same result.
[*] Third time I tried the "alongside existing OS" option. I tried to get Linux Mint 10 take up the enter partition for Linux Mint. I got a result alright! My computer would not boot from the hard drive at all! (it has two hard drives and I suspect now it was trying to boot off the data disk).
[*] Now I'm trying to reinstall both OS's all over again (Linux Mint and Ubuntu) and hope that will sort itself out.

Thankfully, I'm totally paranoid about my data and have multiple back-ups of it all over the place. I've only got 5 external hard drives for this sort of thing... Can't be too careful, eh?


Now, having said all that - can someone tell me how to do the upgrade opting that does not involve installing Linux Mint 10 from scratch? I don't wan't to spend an entire day on upgrading Linux Mint 9 to 10 on my old laptop too. One computer's bad enough!

[M_Mynaardt]

I discovered there is a serious problem (at least in my case) trying to install LM10 using the full install to replace it and the backup tool to restore files and software. The problem is the backup tool!

When I restored files and software from LM10 (and later LM9 when I mistakenly thought LM10 was the problem), the OS started doing quite a few annoying things. First of all; it would not allow me to permanently delete files. Nor could I either access or change permissions to allow that to happen. And there were a few other oddities, like not being able to put launchers on panels, etc., etc.

I've restored LM9 and am just restoring the software and files one by one. A bit of a pain, but at least it's working!

[M_Mynaardt]

What I really did, in hindsight, was not pay attention to the computer name for the new install. That's most likely why LM 10 acted so weird for me. Oh well, I'll try it again when I've got more time off. And a lot more coffee on hand too, methinks!

Thanks for the advice all of you gave me; I just made the mistake to trying to install LM 10 when I was too tired to actually do a good job of it. That's the downside of working nights; these sorts of lapses are easy to come by!

[willie42]

If your computer is trying to boot off the Data disk then you will need to change that in the BIOS. Usually that happens to me when I have try some of my experiments and removed and replace disk and then replacing my org config then I have to set the boot order back up in the BIOS.

[M_Mynaardt]

If your computer is trying to boot off the Data disk then you will need to change that in the BIOS. Usually that happens to me when I have try some of my experiments and removed and replace disk and then replacing my org config then I have to set the boot order back up in the BIOS.

I discovered I can't change the BIOS on my desktop. I figured that out when I first tried to put Linux on my laptop after torching Windows. I found out I had to be careful about which disk the installer chooses by default. For some reason, it chooses the slave disk as the default for the boot disk. Well, it's an old machine anyway. But when I first tried to put on LM 10 to upgrade from LM 9 I didn't realize that the computer name you choose on install has to be exactly the same as the name on your old version. So LM 10 did install, but it just acted plain weird after I ran the backup tool to reinstall software and data.

Oh well, live and learn, eh?