When I have gone from 18.04LTS to 20.04LTS to 22.04LTS, the upgrade has been done in place without requiring a "blank" harddrive and without damaging non-system directories such as /home, /opt, /usr/local, and the like. When I moved from a 2TB harddrive with a fully working 22.04LTS system plus environment I like to a 4TB SSD by doing a fresh install on the 4TB drive including the proprietary Nvidia packages supplied by Ubuntu, everything worked, from the GUI login to choosing MATE as my GUI, etc. I then did as root a cp -prav of the non-system directories from the 2TB drive accessed through a USB adapter to the 4TB drive. After the cp, the GUI login and MATE no longer work, although MATE was working on the system before the cp. I did NOT touch /bin, /etc /sbin, and the like. I did copy my old root home /root so that things would work as I want. Rather than attempting to find what is "broken", I would like to (re)install 22.04LTS over the existing 22.04LTS as an UPGRADE. not re-formatting any disk nor changing the non-system directories. I have a bootable USB attached drive from which I install 22.04LTS (and that I boot as a trial mode on a hardware platform to verify that a computer under consideration that is not "Linux certified" will have fully usable hardware under Ubuntu LTS) -- can I use this USB drive or must I (re)install/upgrade from the web? I suspect that there is a command line method to do this "upgrade re-install" rather than a full install, even if there is no actual upgrade involved (my 22.04LTS on the 4TB SSD is current according to the GUI Software Updater), and there may also be a GUI method.
NOTE: How to Reinstall Ubuntu
JPEG excerpt attached
shows a Reinstall option that does NOT overwrite "personal" files, but only system files. That option does NOT appear when I follow the procedure detailed in the above URL. Can this sort of action be done by other means or is there a different GUI installer for Ubuntu 22.04LTS?
0 Answers