Trying To Upgrade From 9.04 To 9.10

[Richb2004v2]

I've been running a dual boot system for a few months now without trouble. I have Ubuntu 9.04 as the Linux system. I recently tried to upgrade to 9.10 and was told I needed more space in my '/' partition. This seems strange as my '/' partition is 8Gig which I thought would be enough. Obviously I run 9.04 on this partition and have 2.5gig free in it. I wouldn't have thought 9.10 would be that much bigger. Anyway I went to partition manager but that drive has a lock icon on it and I seem to be unable to resize it. I've deleted several unwanted packages to make space but I need 500mb more.

Any ideas?

[SeanMoran]

I'm glad to hear you've finally got your dual-boot to run at last, and don't forget to click the FORMAT check-box when you designate a partition for the new 9.10 installation, so it can happily format all 8Gb and not just the remaining free space on your extant 9.04 partition.

[niller74]

This is due to the upgrade process require quite a lot of overhead for the uncompressing and installation of the new version. Very often you are better off just installing it from scratch.

[TerraPosse]

If you kept your /usr directory on a separate partition then you could just install over 9.04 and your files will be safe. If you haven't done that you may want to use GParted to create an extended partition and move your /usr directory to that partition prior to installing over 9.04. 9.10 is a quite a major upgrade fixing many of the bugs of 9.04. Frankly I was just sooo glad to replace 9.04 with 9.10.

Good luck.

[urandom]

I guess you meant /home and not /usr

[Thanh-BKK]

Hi.

Honest opinion - if your Jaunty runs fine, don't upgrade. If you MUST use Karmic, do a clean install.

I just did the upgrade on my test machine last week and had a bunch of headaches. At first it was a GINORMOUS download (1.3 Gigabyte in my case), then the actual upgrading/installing process froze hard at about 90% and only a push of the reset button could help...... which of course led to a system that only booted to a command line and required quite a bit of messing around before it was able to run smooth again.

And now? well it does run smooth - but so did Jaunty, on that particular machine Karmic is not the slightest bit faster or otherwise more advanced. I read that many who upgrade share the same experience, however installed from scratch Karmic is supposedly somewhat faster.

I'll stick with Jaunty on my main machine at least until the next LTS comes out, and maybe even then keep Jaunty which works absolutely flawless.

Kind regards.....

Thanh

[siamect]

Hi.

Honest opinion - if your Jaunty runs fine, don't upgrade. If you MUST use Karmic, do a clean install.

I just did the upgrade on my test machine last week and had a bunch of headaches. At first it was a GINORMOUS download (1.3 Gigabyte in my case), then the actual upgrading/installing process froze hard at about 90% and only a push of the reset button could help...... which of course led to a system that only booted to a command line and required quite a bit of messing around before it was able to run smooth again.

And now? well it does run smooth - but so did Jaunty, on that particular machine Karmic is not the slightest bit faster or otherwise more advanced. I read that many who upgrade share the same experience, however installed from scratch Karmic is supposedly somewhat faster.

I'll stick with Jaunty on my main machine at least until the next LTS comes out, and maybe even then keep Jaunty which works absolutely flawless.

Kind regards.....

Thanh

I think there may be a problem with upgrading, as stated above, but having said that, I upgraded 3 computers without problems and I think they are faster, at least two of them that I use every day... Third one is in production in a machine where performance is not a problem...

So... not all upgrades from Jaunty to Karmic are problematic but some are...

Best regards

Martin

[TerraPosse]

I guess you meant /home and not /usr

My bad and thanks for correcting me. 

[SeanMoran]

I guess you meant /home and not /usr

My bad and thanks for correcting me.

The bulk of the code; libraries and binaries, of a linux dizzy go into the /usr/ dir. Somewhere just under 2 GB in the /usr/ dir with Ubuntu 9.10 if I can take a rough guess.

Moving the /usr/ dir to another partition would likely save a lot of space on the 8Gb root partition and most likely more than moving /home/, which would be preferable, but if there's only a few mb of .gconf and .config and .mozilla cache, then moving /home/ to another partition is not likely to gain anything.

[TerraPosse]

I guess you meant /home and not /usr

My bad and thanks for correcting me.

The bulk of the code; libraries and binaries, of a linux dizzy go into the /usr/ dir. Somewhere just under 2 GB in the /usr/ dir with Ubuntu 9.10 if I can take a rough guess.

Moving the /usr/ dir to another partition would likely save a lot of space on the 8Gb root partition and most likely more than moving /home/, which would be preferable, but if there's only a few mb of .gconf and .config and .mozilla cache, then moving /home/ to another partition is not likely to gain anything.

The idea was keeping personal files and settings safe from a clean install.  Hence were I erred talking of the /usr directory instead of /home.  If your /home is on a separate partition then you can just make a clean install without loosing any data.

The space issue was related to an upgrade install but if the OP were to make a clean install of 9.10 then the space issue shouldn't arise.

[Richb2004v2]

Well I have finally managed to upgrade! In the end I removed a lot of things I never used to make space for the upgrade. It took a long time to make the change and I felt sure it was going to screw my machine, but in the end it went fine and I now have 9.10. With the better choice of desktop it looks better already. More like MInt now. Brilliant!

[SeanMoran]

Well I have finally managed to upgrade! In the end I removed a lot of things I never used to make space for the upgrade. It took a long time to make the change and I felt sure it was going to screw my machine, but in the end it went fine and I now have 9.10. With the better choice of desktop it looks better already. More like MInt now. Brilliant!

Remember the procedure you used, because Lucid Lynx 10.04 is due for release next month, with the beta due in less than a week.

[JimShortz]

I upgraded my PC from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 with no problems at all; and yes I have a separate home partition so that I can reinstall the operating system without losing all of my personal data. I wish this were simpler/a more obvious options for newbies because to me it is clearly a good idea...

[Richb2004v2]

Sorry to resurrect this topic after so long but I find myself in the same position again now that it's time to upgrade to 10.04. Not that I have to, but it might be nice to.

Last time I solved it by deleting several apps, which gave me the space. I don't want to do that this time. I've reread the previous advice given and can't easily follow any of the suggestions. I've attached a screen shot of my current partitions from Gparted. I'm wondering if I can downsize the 72Gig ntfs partition using Gparted and then increase the other drive with Linus OS on it, which I'm guessing must be Ext 4 /? I've never used Gparted though and wonder if that is even possible and if so will if effect my Windows operation.

I could try a complete install of 10.04 but I'm not sure how to do that either without wiping things.

[siamect]

Sorry to resurrect this topic after so long but I find myself in the same position again now that it's time to upgrade to 10.04. Not that I have to, but it might be nice to.

Last time I solved it by deleting several apps, which gave me the space. I don't want to do that this time. I've reread the previous advice given and can't easily follow any of the suggestions. I've attached a screen shot of my current partitions from Gparted. I'm wondering if I can downsize the 72Gig ntfs partition using Gparted and then increase the other drive with Linus OS on it, which I'm guessing must be Ext 4 /? I've never used Gparted though and wonder if that is even possible and if so will if effect my Windows operation.

I could try a complete install of 10.04 but I'm not sure how to do that either without wiping things.

Before you do anything to your partitions, take a backup....

I'm not sure you can downsize an NTFS volume, You can make it larger to use the unallocated 2GB... I have done that to NTFS volumes a few years ago with gparted.

How do you use the second NTFS volume? Do you have any programs installed there or is it just data? did you move the my documents to the D:?

If your second NTFS volume is data I would back it up together with the /home partition and then wipe the whole extended partition sda2 5 6 7 8 so that only the first NTFS volume remains there. (actually I would remove that one too but I guess you need windows...)

Then I would install 10.4 to the freed up space...

But that's me....

Martin

Edited September 4, 2010 by siamect

[dharmabm]

I would second Martin's suggestion, at least as far as removing the second ntfs partition and resizing your root. You have enough space to copy whatever is there to your primary ntfs partition, and you can always move it somewhere else afterwards. Otherwise, have you ever run apt-get clean? If not, you are still storing the packages for everything you ever installed to ubuntu, and a copy of every version as well. I suspect even that will not free up enough space, but it's worth a try.

kevin

<edit> after looking at your partitions again, you could always just shrink sda5 by a few gigs and grow root to take that space. that would probably do it, but in the long term you're just going to have the same problems. personally, i always keep my movies and music (which are the biggest space hogs) on an external drive, saves a lot of these kind of headaches.oh, and gparted has no problem shrinking ntfs volumes.

Edited September 6, 2010 by dharmabm

[Richb2004v2]

I would second Martin's suggestion, at least as far as removing the second ntfs partition and resizing your root. You have enough space to copy whatever is there to your primary ntfs partition, and you can always move it somewhere else afterwards. Otherwise, have you ever run apt-get clean? If not, you are still storing the packages for everything you ever installed to ubuntu, and a copy of every version as well. I suspect even that will not free up enough space, but it's worth a try.

kevin

<edit> after looking at your partitions again, you could always just shrink sda5 by a few gigs and grow root to take that space. that would probably do it, but in the long term you're just going to have the same problems. personally, i always keep my movies and music (which are the biggest space hogs) on an external drive, saves a lot of these kind of headaches.oh, and gparted has no problem shrinking ntfs volumes.

I tried the clean and got this message.

E: Could not open lock file /var/cache/apt/archives/lock - open (13: Permission denied)

E: Unable to lock the download directory

When you say 'resize your root' what does that mean? Would that be sda6?

Sorry for the delay in my reply, I've been busy.

[Richb2004v2]

Sorry to resurrect this topic after so long but I find myself in the same position again now that it's time to upgrade to 10.04. Not that I have to, but it might be nice to.

Last time I solved it by deleting several apps, which gave me the space. I don't want to do that this time. I've reread the previous advice given and can't easily follow any of the suggestions. I've attached a screen shot of my current partitions from Gparted. I'm wondering if I can downsize the 72Gig ntfs partition using Gparted and then increase the other drive with Linus OS on it, which I'm guessing must be Ext 4 /? I've never used Gparted though and wonder if that is even possible and if so will if effect my Windows operation.

I could try a complete install of 10.04 but I'm not sure how to do that either without wiping things.

Before you do anything to your partitions, take a backup....

I'm not sure you can downsize an NTFS volume, You can make it larger to use the unallocated 2GB... I have done that to NTFS volumes a few years ago with gparted.

How do you use the second NTFS volume? Do you have any programs installed there or is it just data? did you move the my documents to the D:?

If your second NTFS volume is data I would back it up together with the /home partition and then wipe the whole extended partition sda2 5 6 7 8 so that only the first NTFS volume remains there. (actually I would remove that one too but I guess you need windows...)

Then I would install 10.4 to the freed up space...

But that's me....

Martin

I don't have anything too important to backup. All my files, music etc are on external drives.

I'm afraid I'm not sure what is where on my drives. Before I wipe them how would I go about saving all my applications? Actually I'm not even sure how to wipe it. Could I not just put a LiveCD in and install over those partitions?

Again, sorry for delay in reply and my poor understanding of this process.

[siamect]

sda6 is the root partition /

the errors is because you don't have permissions...

type

sudo apt-get clean

A partition backup of the C drive and the D drive should take care of the applications. However I don't recommend you to use partition backups to move stuff around on the disk even if it probably (but only probably) works...

I don't have a good recommendation of program,,, Partimage can work (I use it) but the ntfs support is experimental sooo,,, warning! They also have had some issues with restore of larger volumes.... which is possible to work around but...

If you need your windows... don't wipe that partition unless you are prepared to make a reinstall. Back it up anyway

You can use Gparted to delete the partitions you want. and yes I think there is a partition editor in the install of Ubuntu as well. However I would prepare everything before I use the installation CD, For me it feels better to mess around with Gparted and get familiar with it than to put in the Install CD and do the partitioning there. But that's me...

Martin