I would like to upgrade to a recent supported version. My hardware is a Dell XPS running XP. It would be OK to lose everything on the 10.04 but I am not sure how to go about reformatting the Ubuntu partition. Can anyone help this newbie?
Thanks, Sick Berry
Warning before you proceed:
In any case when upgrading an OS perform a backup of any valuable data on an external storage medium just in the unlikely but not impossible case something goes wrong.
Regular upgrades will only work without issues through still supported releases, i.e. from 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS. A release that reached end of life like 10.04 can be upgraded but it may not give us desired results. A much faster, easier, and more reliable way would be to just perform a fresh install of the new release over the old release.
This is possible with keeping our HOME, leaving our personal data untouched, and it may even try to preserve application settings whenever possible. We then only may have to re-install our additionally installed applications, and we will also have to restore the user accounts (which shoulf be easy if we had chosen identical user names)
To do so we will be presented a screen similar to below on installing from a CD or USB with a more recent version (shown here for "upgrading" 15.04 to 16.04 by skipping release 15.10, which is similar to "upgrading" 10.04 to 14.04 or 15.10):
On choosing the "Upgrade" option your drive will not be formatted, data in the HOME directory will not be deleted, and the dual boot option will be preserved.
Advanced users can also fine-tune the partition layout by choosing "something else" but this bears a much higher risk to accidentally remove partitions or files we wanted to keep.
