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I have a dual boot configuration (MS Windows 7, Ubuntu 12.04) and I'm using Grub2. How do I upgrade without breaking anything?

This is my work laptop and I need to make sure that nothing will break. Is it possible without doing a clean install (installing 14.04 on top of 12.04)?

Thanks.

Ali
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2 Answers2

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When you do a distro upgrade nobody can guarantee, that nothing will break.

I would recommend to create a backup image of your hard drive with clonezilla (Its a special linux live system for image-based snapshots) and save it to an external usb drive, for example.

Then, if anything breaks, you can easily roll back the saved image and everything will be as before the upgrade.

If you like to learn how to use clonezillea, you can watch tutorials such as this one, google for tutorials, and try to backup and restore in a virtual machine.

BelfryGhost
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This is my work laptop and I need to make sure that nothing will break.

It can never be guaranteed that nothing will break. If you use your system for work, and any amount of downtime is unacceptable, then:

  • Install on another PC
  • Install on another (possibly new) hard drive
  • Install on your existing harddrive but on another partition (if you have used LVM for your existing install, then create a new LVM Logical Volume)
  • Take a full backup of your existing parition, install over it, and if it fails, then restore the backup

On my work system, I have multiple 8GB partitions for base installs of different operating systems, and I always do a fresh install of the new system onto an empty partition. If you can not afford downtime from a failed upgrade, then I recommend you adopt a similar process. 8GB of disk space is cheap, hosing your work system due to a failed upgrade is not.

bain
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  • thanks, I'll start the upgrade process tonight! hopefully nothing major will break. – Ali May 07 '14 at 13:03