Restore trisquel to fresh installation, is it possible?
is it possible to restore Trisquel to a fresh installation without losing the data on the HD, or should I reinstall it and the back up the files?
If you have everything under one partition, then you will have to backup and reinstall. That is the most common situation.
Some people customise their installations so that the /home directory is on a separate partition, so that reinstallation doesn't mean moving files onto an external media. But not many people do this.
I would recommend just backing up and reinstalling, which is probably the easiest and safest way. Plus if your hard drive eventually dies at least you will have a backup.
As far as I remember Trisquel's default partitioning separates /home (on XFS) from the system (on ext4).
@Marco: could you give us the output of the 'mount' command (to be entered in a terminal) to see whether your /home is separated?
Perhaps a "$ df -h" would output something simpler than "mount" :-)
I am a member!
You can reinstall, but make sure that your '/home' partition gest
mounted, but not formatted. When you set up your initial user, make
sure her/his name is same as in original install. Note, you'll have to
use the advanced partition setup.
-Dave
@Marco: could you give us the output of the 'mount' command (to be entered in a terminal) to see whether your /home is separated?
here is what 'mount' shows
/dev/sda6 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,commit=0)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755)
none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880)
none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
/dev/sda8 on /home type xfs (rw,relatime)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/user/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=user
)
I also have gnusense installed
here is what a df -h shows
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 9.2G 3.6G 5.2G 42% /
udev 741M 4.0K 741M 1% /dev
tmpfs 300M 844K 300M 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 750M 88K 750M 1% /run/shm
/dev/sda8 199G 29G 171G 15% /home
In that case you can just reinstall Trisquel on /dev/sda6. But you have to make sure that you don't format /dev/sda8 when you do the installation. You will need to set /dev/sda8 as your mount point for /home during the installation.
The installer will provide a warning saying which partitions will be formatted before it does anything.
PS. I would recommend backing up your important files anyway (just in case...)
Not sure if I was entirely clear in my previous message, but I would just like to clarify that you should only format the /dev/sda6 partition (and perhaps the swap), and nothing else.
I'll back everything up but I want to try to reinstall it without formatting the HD just for the sake of it, thank for everyone for the help, I'll let you know how it goes.