by jiml8 » Jan 2nd, '16, 19:26
I made the move from Mandriva 2010 32 bit to Mageia 2 64 bit. Because I went from 32 to 64 bit, I had no choice but a complete reinstall.
It turned out to be relatively easy. I copied my entire Mandriva 2010 installation off to another location (my home directory was already on a different hard drive), then did a clean install of Mageia. I then made the necessary changes to point to my /home directory rather than the new one created by the Mageia installer, and started installing packages...and for each package I installed, I copied in its config information from the Mandriva /etc directory.
I have a very complicated system; I do development work in a substantial number of different environments and languages, so I have virtual machines and an assortment of servers running on this system. I was up and running in my environment within about 2 hours of commencing the new install, and had everything running - all of it - within about 2 days. I did have some difficulty with a few KDE things, but by and large, I had my entire environment running immediately.
So, don't be afraid of a reinstall. Just make preparations beforehand.