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Kendor
Asked: 2011-01-09 05:57:39 +0800 CST

Moving to New Machine... also upgrade to 64bit. What steps?

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I am about to move to a new Lenovo X201 from current X61. Current setup has separate \home, separate swap file, also separate \Data partition. Am currently running 10.04 32 bit. Am considering running 64 bit on new machine because I will now have 8 GB of RAM. And would like to also move to 10.10.

Ideally I would like preserve as much of my current setup as possible...

New machine has Win7 on it, but will blow that away, as I've made a clonezilla copy of it, and will use VirtualBox for when I need Windows.

Can someone suggest a good step by step for me? I'm networked to a NAS and also have plenty of external USB storage in case I need intermediary steps.

So do I set up new machine first with 64bit 10.10, with partition scheme I want? then rsnyc over \home from old machine (over write target home)?

Do I need to upgrade the X61 first to 10.10?

upgrade

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Yes, rsync is a good way to copy your files to the new computer. If you want the same set of packages installed, you might also want to run synaptic and File -> Generate Package Download script on the old machine, and load it into the new machine.

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  2. Given that plenty of space is available, use a live system (usb stick) to create a tar archive of each of the two partitions you want to migrate - home and data - and store them on the NAS or the external disk. Install Ubuntu the normal way, creating the relevant partitions. Then untar the archive on the new computer, possibly from a live system. That way you can be sure that the permissions, special files etc. are preserved. This page gives a sample tar command line.

    You should be able to reuse the old home partition as is; any incompatibility would be the result of a bug. Discard the root partition, which holds /usr etc. The configuration files in your home partition should be agnostic as to 32bit or 64bit.

    If your old user had User ID 1001 and your new user ID 1000, you need to change the permissions of the files in your /home.

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