by Mighty_Cheese » Wed Sep 25, 2013 10:07 pm
As mentioned previously, back up your data. My suggestion is to compy the contents of your ~/home directory to a portable HDD /another machine/Large USB drive (depending on how much data you have).
One way of doing this is....
When you come to install Mint you have the option during the install of creating a custom partition table.. not really as scary as it sounds once you have a few basics!
Tell the installer not to automatically format the entire drive, but that you want to set up your own partitions. First create a partition for swap (not 100% necessary but it can improve speed) make it the same size as the amount of RAM in your machine for simplicity. Second create a partition for "/" depending on what packages you are going to install and how many this could vary in size, but I tend to find 20-30 GB plenty. There will be a drop-down list of what to use the partition for. Third create a partition from the remainder of the drive and select "/home" from the list of options. Finally tell the installer to write the partitions and allow the rest of the install to proceed as normal.
There will be a number of options whilst formatting about what to format partitions as. Swap is just swap, but for simplicity just pick EXT4/EXT3.
If you are dual booting with another OS make sure that you don't select the partition used by that (windows will be marked as NTFS/FAT32 normally)
Once you have your OS installed grab your software from the repos and drop your data into the appropriate directories in ~/home.
The benefit of making a separate /home partition is that if you choose to swap distro in future it should preserve your data - however its always best policy to back up first.
"You've heard Queen,
You've heard Squeeze,
But you ain't heard nothing like the Mighty Cheese"