Reinstalling Fedora while keeping /home partition

Ask Fedora
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I want to open this comment saying this:
Thank you, to OP for making the issue, to the other users for helping in, and for Arturas B. for giving THE solution.

This solution quite literally saved me[1], but it lacks some important context[2], so I HAVE, out of duty, respect, and love for anyone else in the same position to easily understand what the heckarony is going on and thus learn how to deal with this not-so-friendly installer (to be frank tho, Windows’ ain’t that friendly either, it will just bulldoze through and delete important stuff without asking :slight_smile: ):

There are 3 options to chose in the Live USB Boot after selecting the drive/s one wants to install Fedora on:

  1. The easy automatic one.
  2. The “I have no idea what I am looking at”.
  3. And the “oh lord, this is not where I belong”.

The second option (“personalized install” or whatever it’s called) is the one to chose, the one with the most “UI” feeling to it, since the first is just a sledgehammer and the third is impossible for humans to understand.

Using the third I managed to understand (since it was NOT said in plain english anywhere on the internet for normies) that / and /home are subpartitions of the same Btrsf “Fedora” partition.

This means that to reinstall Fedora without losing data (the /home one) but the installed files one has to do this:

  1. Start the install process from the Live USB Boot.
  2. Create the same Account/User_Profile (Admin) as it was in the previous install (the same name will make “the ID” overlap, solving that issue), and once you will finally boot back in the FIXED old data+account so do the same for any other account which may have also been there (this one PC is used by multiple people).
  3. The place, data and keyboard options (or whatever) can remain default. I GUESS you maybe should match what they were for the previous install, but it’s your PC, so you’d get them to be the same regardless.
  4. NOW FOR THE STORAGE SELECTION: select the same drive as “before”, and select the “personalized” install. There it’ll ask you “delete for space, create new Btrfs partition”. You WILL notice that / and /home have the same size, that’s because the UI fails to tell you those are SUBpartitions, and thus that DELETING ONE WILL NOT AFFECT THE DATA OF THE OTHER!!! .
    Click on the /home one, and select mount_point as “/boot”; then select / and delete it with the - (minus) symbol close to the bottom-left of the screen, after that re-create it and give it the same size as it had before (same size as /home ). After you have done that go to /boot and /boot/efi; you have to “mount them as their own names, like /home was”, but contrary to home you have to check the box asking to “reformat them”. This will basically swipe them clean and recreate them.
  5. Now, if you didn’t want extra partitions, like Ext4 ones (for any reason), you are done. Even if you wanted to add them, I believe it’s safer to do it AFTER you saved your murdered install, the small ri-partitioning can wait for KDE_Partition_Manager. You can click the “done” button (I installed it in italian, it’s “Fatto” for me) and the install will proceed pretty fast.

And now you are done.
I hope whoever needs to do this can find THIS post with THAT answer (and this small clarification) before Google vomits them stuff which is WAY MORE COMPLEX and which DID NOT EVEN WORK FOR ME.

Here’s links of things which didn’t help because the commands didn’t work:

  1. This was basically the first one that I’ve found.
    Without pasting in “the papyrus of text”[3] that was on the Konsole, I’ll just say that “it didn’t work 1/3rd or 1/4 of the way in, with commands not responding”.
  1. This one is not that direct to this issue, it’s actually the last link I tested before coming back to this post.
  1. This was just overcomplicated, couldn’t understand a thing.

  1. I wanted to install W10 as secondary OS because I wanted to test GT 1030 stuff. Since it’s easier and safer to do it BEFORE W10 dies this 14th of october I decided to do it now. That damn OS REFUSED to install itself before I just literally unplugged all the sata cables but its one! It just whined giving errors like “me no likey! me can not make new partition here! waaa!!”. That’s what I get for thrusting Devs, expecting humans to make tools which are easy to use and understand by other humans… ↩︎

  2. This other post How to Reinstall (Clean Install) Fedora 34 without losing data (/home)?
    helped me figure it out ↩︎

  3. Italian say. ↩︎