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I reinstalled Ubuntu 12.04 after a corruption caused by a faulty operation (not much interesting but you can read about it). The old system had three partitions, one for boot, one for / and one for home. I followed these instructions to restore the system keeping my home dir. Basically what I did was:

  1. full backup of the old disc using dd
  2. export the list of installed packages in the old system
  3. reinstall Ubuntu 12.04 not formatting the partition containing home directories
  4. reinstall the packages I had in the old system using the list of step 1.

Everything still works and most of the settings have been kept, but not all. I have my desktop icons, my firefox bookmarks, etc. But other configurations have been lost.

Now I'd like to replace the /etc of the new system with the /etc of the old one - I have a copy of it - so to have the same system as before, or at least very similar.

Before trying by myself to swap the new /etc with the old one I'd like to be aware of the possible issues which could arise, so to prevent bad things from happening again.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Community
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Paolo
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1 Answers1

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If you are using the same computer you are probably safe but don't replace /etc/fstab, you want to use your new system partitions, not the old ones.

If this is a different system all hardware-related files (like hdparm.conf, sane.d) could cause trouble.

If you just want to transfer a couple of settings (like printers and network config) it's probably wiser to only copy the files and dirs that you want to keep.

Javier Rivera
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