Progress on 12.04 (Was: Re: 12.04 upgrade problem)

[Jim Smith]

 Thanks to those who helped. I have made some progress on recovering my 
upgrade to 12.04 from 11.10. The upgrade was done using Update Manager 
thus: "gksu "update-manager -d" " from a terminal. Everything appeared 
to go fine until time to boot the new system. It only went about half 
way and hung with a mess of error messages.I have since d/l a copy of 
the 12.04.01 install disk. Booting with the disk I was first unable to 
copy the files from my home directory to a portable HD. A workaround 
went thus: I was able to open a terminal on the desktop, then using the 
command "sudo su root" I opened a root shell in the terminal. In that 
shell I issued the command "nautilus" to open a file manager with root 
privileges. I then copied the entire /home directory to the portable HD 
with no problem. Thus backed up I can probably re-install with no problems.
 
 I have one question. The partition I use for Ubuntu on this old laptop 
shows as 48Gb. Approximately how much should I use for / and how much 
for /home (home is about 20Gb)?

Thanks all

Jim