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How can I switch a 32-bit installation to a 64-bit one?

I was quite sure myself that it's not possible to switch from a 32-bit to a 64-bit Ubuntu without a clean re-install, and of course there is a popular question titled Is it possible to “upgrade” from a 32bit to a 64bit installation?, answers to which unanimously suggest that the easiest way is to do a clean re-install.

Then I saw this question, where the OP says they upgraded from Ubuntu 11.10 (32 bit) to Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit) by booting from a LiveCD and choosing "Upgrade existing installation of Ubuntu", an option which as I remember only appeared in recent versions of Ubuntu installer.

I realized that there's nothing which would in theory prevent a successful upgrade this way - the system is "offline", my understanding is that the installer simply removes everything from the root partition leaving only /home/ and installs new binaries, kernel and everything. So it looks it should be possible to switch from 32 bit to 64 bit (and even from 64 bit to 32 bit) using this procedure.

So the question is: where is the catch? Why is it not the recommended way to switch between 32 and 64-bit architectures?

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Sergey
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  • That question and its top answer are from before Multiarch came onto the scene. At the time, you either had a 32-bit system or a 64-bit system. Now (I think 12.04 is the turning point) you can have a mixed system, and you might be able to switch on an upgrade. I'm not posting this as an answer because I'm not sure, but in principle a cross-architecture upgrade should be possible now. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Sep 25 '12 at 22:26
  • What is the desire to do this? I would say the answer still remains, simply do a re-install. While your installation will run, you might have a 32-bit userspace and 64-bit kernel or vice versa :-) – balloons Oct 04 '12 at 20:11
  • @balloons: the desire is to be able to switch from 32-bit to 64-bit without a full reinstall, a question which is often asked on this site. Besides, I believe that clean reinstall is for wimps :) It's much more fun to fix any problems manually, learning something in the process then just give up and wipe the system. I'm wondering if that "if in doubt - reinstall" attitude comes from long time Windows users trained to perceive the system as some kind of magical voodoo artifact. – Sergey Oct 05 '12 at 00:33
  • @Sergey : Re-install isn't just for wimps. Some of us are time poor and just don't have time to spend debugging a broken system. Yes it can be fun to do so as long as you don't need a bullet proof system right now. Both approaches are perfectly valid however being in the time poor and bandwidth poor group I much prefer downloading once followed by a 15 minute install. An on line upgrade doesn't leave you with a bootable install disk at the end of it. – fabricator4 Oct 08 '12 at 04:54
  • For the record - I don't think this question should've been closed, I was aware of the "duplicate" question - my question was about upgrading from a LiveCD session, which is a different procedure then upgrading using upgrade manager from within the OS – Sergey Nov 14 '12 at 05:48

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