hi, I really must bite the bullet and upgrade my system, so I’m asking for a bit of advice on how to do this, as I’m rather nervous about it. I’m upgrading Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04, the current long-term supported version.
I have 2 disks, I will disconnect the power supply of one in order to be sure of not messing it up during the upgrade. Hopefully that’s ok.
The one to be upgraded has a data partition I don’t want to lose. It’s backed up but I’d rather simply not lose it in the first place. I don’t properly understand the installation/upgrade dialogue, EFI things, mount points etc., it seems to me it gets messy if you’re not going onto a blank disk.
So my main query is do I need to delete some partitions in the early stage of the upgrade.
The disk in question looks like this (partition 2 is Ubuntu 18.04, part.4 is my data) -
Do I delete partitions 1 & 2 during the upgrade dialogue, then install 20.04? Or delete just 2? Or neither?
Does part.1 include the “file catalogue” for MyStuff? In which case I’d presumably better not delete it!
I’m hoping 20.04 has darktable dependencies which are new enough for me to compile Dev. Does that sound ok pls?
P1 looks like an EFI partition, please do not touch it unless you know what you are doing. If you delete this, your machine might not work any more without recreating it the partition.
Usually, your P2 should be just the system files
P3 is not of any relevance
If everything is set up as expected, then P4 should be the only thing that contains your data (should be you /home/ directory) - this means you could also replace the full OS by just installing anything over P2 and all your data would survive.
EDIT: I just saw that P4 is not your home - this means if you delete P2 all your data in /home/ will be gone. Make a backup of your /home/ in any case!
But in doubt - follow @kofa advice, following the instructions will always work.
I am an openSuse users, so this may not be relevant to Ubuntu.
Ext4 is an adequate filesystem, but there are others that provide additional features. For example, I note that Ubuntu supports both XFS and ZFS, these are probably better for larger image files.
As others have said, don’t repartition. However, you might want to consider whether a change of file system may be a good idea. If you do this, you will need to back up the partitions that you change and make sure that the backups have worked
If you go with the standard procedure, it won’t touch your home; it’ll upgrade your packages and config, so make sure your /etc is backed up. I back that up every day (not using Ubuntu’s tools but with dirvish), so I don’t do anything before an upgrade, just launch it.
I tried “sudo do-release-upgrade” however it made a mess! So I reverted to a fresh install with bootable media and that has gone pretty well. It gave me a simple option to just overwrite the current OS, which I don’t think it did previously. The 2nd disk was offline this time, so only one OS was visible, not three, so I guess that’s why the simple option was present this time.
I appreciate this isn’t an Ubuntu forum but I’ll just mention a problem that I now have but didn’t have before upgrading. I have a flying USB lead from the back of the PC to near my keyboard where I can plug in USB sticks, USB drives, graphics tablet etc. Now it looks like only the first item to be plugged in after booting up works. Second and subsequent devices are no longer recognised. I will have to google this etc but in the meantime, anyone had USB issues like this?!!
