Upgrade from 8.04 to 10.04 LTS (BORKED)

[Gilles Gravier]

 Hi!

On 13/09/2010 02:03, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 12 September 2010 22:09,  <clintin at linuxmail.org> wrote:
>> This is not an option as there is no space to available to this plus there
>> is over 30 GB of stuff on this 40 GB drive.  I really needed the update to
>> work and preserve all the settings on this system.
> Backup all your stuff, then boot from a live CD, mount the hard disk,
> and delete everything on it except /home and its contents. Be careful
> not to delete the /home folder.
>
> Ideally, then, so you don't have the problem again, shrink /home a bit
> and make a separate filesystem, ideally before /home on the disk, for
> / (the root filesystem). This is much preferable and now you've
> experienced why.
>
> When you reinstall, tell the installer to use the /home volume for
> /home and (VERY important) *NOT* to format it. It will pick up all
> your existing settings and customisations - you'll just have to
> reinstall any programs you've added by hand.
>

*IT CERTAINLY WON'T*

Preserving /home keeps your existing USER settings and customizations.
It *DOES NOT* keep things like applications, service configurations and
so on. If you have a web server configuration, the files are most likely
NOT in /home. If you have a media server, the media server software
configuration is most likely NOT in /home.

Doing what Liam suggest is NOT going to let you reinstall a fully
configured system like that.

You need to keep track of your current system configuration settings
(network configuration, users lists / password - stored in /etc/passwd
and /etc/shadow). If you have a SAMBA server configured, have a look in
/etc/samba. If you have MySQL configured, it stores configuration files
and data files in /var (many applications do, this is an important file
struture with many things that are required for your configuration to work).

I repeat, DO NOT expect Liam's instructions to let you reinstall a
machine that simply. You WILL have to reconfigure almost every single
service / application installed. Liam's instructions ONLY preserve USER
configuration settings (your desktop, your individual application
settings, and most of your documents that aren't shared).

Gilles.