I am going to upgrade Linux Mint 13 to Linux Mint 17.1 on a home computer. I am going to do a fresh upgrade. There are three partitions for swap
, /
and /home
. I will preserve swap
and /home
. The partition for /
will be formatted and Linux Mint 17.1 will be installed there.
There are four users (including me) on this machine. The files and settings will be safe in /home
.
The question is how can I preserve user accounts (login names and login passwords) for other users? I know the login information is stored in /etc/passwd
. I can save and restore this file (or information about other three users). So I can link the home folders with correct login names and UIDs.
What about passwords? Is it enough to save and restore /etc/shadow
?
It is easy for one user systems. I would just restore my user account during the install by choosing the same login name and login password. And it will correctly link with the correct home folder.
It is easy for one user systems. I would just restore my user account during the install by choosing the same login name and login password.
It is not. You will get a new and empty home folder./home
partitions. Of course it won’t delete existing user folders. At the very worst, the UIDs might not match, but fixing that is trivial.