You don't need to buy a new hard drive for that. It depends on if you have or not free space in /dev/sda. If you don't then go for buying a new hard drive, if you do then use gparted for reducing the size of partition where you have /home and you'll get new free space unpartitioned. With that , you can make a new partition , ext4 type, for the / new 12.04. <div class="gmail_quote">2012/4/5 Mark Panen <<a href="mailto:mark.panen@gmail.com">mark.panen@gmail.com</a>> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Hi, I have three hard drives. /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sda is partitioned: /boot / swap /home i want to purchase a new hard drive and basically install 12.04 LTS from scratch when it is released but i want to copy my /home from /dev/sda onto the new hardrive and make the new hard drive bootable. Any pointers please? -- Cheers Mark -- ubuntu-users mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com" target="_blank">ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users</a> </blockquote></div>