Understanding btrfs to reinstall without losing data

I need to reinstall Fedora 36 because my graphics have become kaput. I can log into a text interface, but neither Nvidia nor Nouveau will provide any images.

I have read How to Reinstall (Clean Install) Fedora 34 without losing data (/home)? - #9 by dhvlktry, but I do not see how to do what is recommended.

If I delete root, /home also disappears. I see no information about “subvolumes” anywhere in the interface.

Complicating matters further, I have four items in the “Manual partitioning” page, each containing several subitems that seem to be identical.

New Fedora 36 Installation – empty
Fedora Linux 36 for x86_64 – two items, /home and /, both at 890 GiB
Fedora Linux 36 for x86_64 – four items, / (890 GiB again), /boot, /boot/efi, and swap
Unknown – four items, two btrfs (both 890 GiB, one root/var/lib/machines; the other root00/var/lib/machines) and two iso9660s (sdc at 2.7 TiB; sdf at 29.88 GiB)

So I have five active partitions, volumes, and/or subvolumes (or perhaps yet some other name) which each occupy the same space on the same disk.

Could someone please explain what’s going on here and how I can safely reinstall?

I do have backups, so I can wipe the whole thing and start over, but I’d like to know what’s going on.

Thanks!

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I confirm you observation when trying to reproduce it.

You would need to select the third option, the blivet editor.
Here you can select the btrfs volume in the left hand culumn, and then you can delete the root subvolume and recreate a new root subvolume. For the home subvolume you just need to define the mount point, For the non-btrfs partitions you need to define a mount point, and perhaps also chowse format.

When chosing “Manual partitioning” don’t lete you format the root files systemd, and it also don’t allow you just to remove the root subvolume (unless there is a secret way to do it).

This may (hopefully) change in some future version.

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Thanks!

I’ll give it another try; when I looked at it yesterday, I couldn’t see how to prevent formatting of home.

Fred

The blivet gui gives you full control of what happens with each subvolume.

You need to switch to that part of the UI where all the subvolumes are listed.

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The Blivet option worked like a charm.

I think what confused me is that there’s no indication in the interface which partitions (volumes, subvolumes, whatever) are being wiped and recreated and which are remaining the same.

Thanks again!
Fred

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