I'm planning to upgrade from Quantal ( 50 GB of /, 2 GB of swap and 250 GB of /home ) to Raring when it is released. Clean install, choosing Upgrade option only give me messy display.
How do I mount my existing 250 GB /home (not encrypted), when I install Raring as my new /home?
First. Make backups of your /home. Then make copies of important documents in a flash drive (One can never be too careful).
Second, boot the computer from Live USB/DVD and start the install process.
The installer should see the existing Ubuntu 12.10 and give you an option to upgrade from installation disk or some such thing (do not remember the exact words). This will preserve the /home partition and do a clean install. This will also try to reinstall some of the other packages you already have. Not all apps will get installed this way, as it depends on which repository they are from. Official Ubuntu repository based packages are most likely to get installed again.
When it comes to naming the primary user and creating the user ID. Use exactly the same ID you had before. This will associate the user to its old /home/[user] folder. If you have other users for this machine, recreate the IDs after installation is complete and the first reboot.
If for some reason upgrade from installation disk does not work, choose Something Else... and select the / as the install location. The mount point should be /. Check the format partition option. Make sure /home partition is not checked for formatting. As before, choose your primary user ID as the one you had before.
Hope this helps
