Upgrading to Mint 6 and skipping Mint 5

[proxima_centauri]

It was advisable to avoid upgrading with Mint 5, so I would say it's definetely not advisable to upgrade with Mint 4.

Do you have a seperate /home partition? If you do you can select not to format it during the fresh install and retain your data.
If not, can you make a backup of your home partition, including all of the hidden configuration files?
If you reinstall with Mint 6, and then copy a replica of settings from your original /home folder you should retain all current settings.

[proxima_centauri]

Essentially when I said "upgrade", I mean upgrading Linux Mint 4 -> Linux Mint 6 via the internet by updating packages (which I don't think is even possible). This is known to cause some problems though when using this method with Linux Mint 5 (for which a new tool was made).
The correct way to upgrade in your case would not to do as above, but to reinstall Mint 6 with a LiveCD.

First, why do you have 115GB of unallocated space??!!? that is ALOT of harddrive space not being used.
I'm not sure if you copied your parition table correctly, (you have two sda1's)
Could you please post the results of this used in terminal please

Code: Select all

sudo fdisk -l

[garda]

Just wanted to add another piece of information here...

You can backup your Mozilla profiles to keep all your Thunderbird emails and Firefox data. They are kept in your home directory, under /home/username/.mozilla/ for Firefox and /home/username/.mozilla-thunderbird for Thunderbird. Copy both directories to another partition (or USB stick), and life will be good.

I do not recommend copying your entire home directory, as it contains some configuration files that may be incompatible with Gnome 2.24.

[proxima_centauri]

Okay,

If I'm interpretting it right,
/dev/sda1 partition is "/" and takes up roughly 60GB
/dev/sda2 is an extended partition which is set up to use around 1.5GB inside it
/dev/sd5 which is contained within sda2 is your SWAP file of around 1.5GB

Which begs the questions, where is the ~100GB of remaining space you have, what happened to sda4/sda5?
Unallocated doesn't mean free diskspace, it means it's an unformatted piece of space that will never be used until you format it as it's own partition, or merge an existing partition into it.

If you could post a screenshot of gparted maybe I could wrap my head around it, but something definetly looks off.

Like I said earlier, all your configuration files are hidden in your "/home" folder, if you make a backup of these files, all your settings should be saved and reinstated once you copy them to your fresh install.

[proxima_centauri]

Yea it's kinda what I thought:
You have a huge space in your harddrive not being used by anything, and will continue to be that way until you format it. This is the most essential thing we must address.
I almost think it would be best to start off from scratch. Do you have a way to backup all your essential files for a complete wipe and reinstall?

If so, I would recommend you do the following to your partition using gparted on the LiveCD:
Delete everything on it so you have 232.88GB of unallocated space.
Create partition 1 which will be /dev/sda1, format it ext3 and make it ~10GB: this is the partition we will use for "/".
Create partition 2 which will be /dev/sda2, format it to SWAP (if your running under 2GB RAM make it double the size of your memory, if 2+GB RAM of memory, 2 or 3GB is sufficient for SWAP.
Create partition 3 which will be /dev/sda3, format it to ext3 and here you can either use the rest of your disk up for "/home", or you can leave some diskspace for another partition if you want to make one.

Then start the Install, select manual install when it asks about the partitions, set up the partitions like i described as above,
sda1 "/"
sda2 SWAP
sda3 "/home"

Make sense?

[rivenought]

@ proxima_centauri, (and others, who may have research to share)

I would like for you to share your opinion on the following:

sda1 - /
sda2 - /swap
sda3 - /home

vs.

sda1 - /swap
sda2 - /
sda3 - /home

Have you discovered any major differences in performance between the two?

Not meaning to hijack the thread, but I was just wondering what might be the best method and why it would be so. I do agree that starting over might be the easiest option for foreverlasting hot so that a solid base is set up for his Mint experience to be successful.

[proxima_centauri]

Putting /SWAP as the front of the disk is probably the best way to do it if you rely on SWAP a good part of the time, I think it's the fastest at the front of the disk, I think you're right in that respect Rivenought. (I just never seen someone's paritioning having SWAP first so I didn't want it to look weird )

I remember reading too, perhaps falsely remembering, that putting swap inbetween two partitions being used can also be good since the disk is going back and forth between these partitions anyways, lowers the seek time.

Honestly, for me it doesn't make a difference. I set my system up with SWAP for suspend and whatnot, but I set the vmswappiness to 0 since I have 4GB RAM.

[rivenought]

proxima_centauri,

I had just wondered since I already do pretty much what you suggested above except that I have my /swap as sda1 and my / as sda2. Years ago when I was first experimenting with partitions, /swap came before / with the group from which I was learning. Since then, I have noticed your suggestion mentioned more and more. I can see the benefit from both positions, and with modern hardware, there is probably not much difference in everyday performance. Thanks for sharing.