Mageia forum

After many years with Mandrake/Mandriva, 2011 has finally convinced me that I need to change distribution. The only problem is I would like to keep all my important data (saved emails, money accounts, etc.) which is currently on my Mandriva home partition. Is it possible to install Mageia 2 keeping the current home partition?

Many thanks.

paulcbrennan2001 wrote:Is it possible to install Mageia 2 keeping the current home partition?

Yes.

I recently installed Mageia from a livecd and was able to retain my /home partition. I don't remember exactly how I did it... I think I ran diskdrake to identify which partition /home was on and when I reinstalled, I formatted all the partitions EXCEPT for the one with /home on it. The graphical live installer made it an easy task. I'm sure someone else will chime in with better instruction or you could try the mageia channels on freenode for more support. Good luck and please let us know how it turns out!

Many thanks for your reply. When I get time I will do the install. I'm sure it must be OK as when I upgraded versions of Mandriva I always did a clean install but left my home partition unformatted. Fingers crossed!!

Thanks again.

Hello,
You can keep your /home partition very easily. The installer auto-detect your /home partitions (you can have several) and ask you which one you want to use. The next step it ask you if you want to format it, just say no, or more precisely, don't check the box.
http://docteam.mageia.nl/installer/cont ... int_s.html
http://docteam.mageia.nl/installer/cont ... tions.html

Many thanks, I'll do that.

Didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped but everything is fine now. Well done Mageia, back to how life was!!

Many thanks.

Congrats and welcome to Mageia!

paulcbrennan2001 wrote:Didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped but everything is fine now. Well done Mageia, back to how life was!!

Mind to give some details what exactly didn't go so smoothly? You know, constructive criticism is always welcome ...

My fault, not Mageia. Kept my original Mandriva home partition but stupidly changed my user name meaning I had to transfer all my files to my new user file - DOH.

I do have a genuine problem though. I downloaded and installed Adobe Reader and now Firefox won't start (can use Opera or Chrome though). Deleted and re-installed Firefox but still no go. Any ideas?

Many thanks.

Well, start Firefox in safe mode and disable any Acrobat Reader plugin. firefox --safe-mode should do it, for more information http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_Mode

But i think there was some other problem with acrobat reader, which caused something like this. Which version of Reader did you install, and did you use the RPM package for that?

Started Firefox in safe mode - that was OK. Checked plugins but Adobe Reader was not there. Never mind, quite happy with Opera & Chrome.

Many thanks.

Ok, no problem. If you still want to dig into it in the future or so, IIRC there was some bash completion file or something like that
coming from Acrobat Reader, /etc/bash_completion.d/acroread.sh which caused some problems.