According to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuReinstallation I should be able to reinstall 16.04 without losing my /home folder even if I did not put it on a separate partition, which I did not because I was an Ubuntu n00b at the time. I have backed up all my important files and configurations/settings, but it would save me a lot of headache if I could get this to work. At the moment, I am having some doubts and questions which I would like to air before proceeding.
The LiveUSB I am using for installation does not recognise that there is already an operating system on the hard drive, which there is: I have, an albeit buggy, 16.04 already installed. Should I be worried by this, and does it not bode well for my prospects of reinstallation? I have also tried using a LiveCD with exactly the same results.
The link above makes no mention about what happens if you installed with an lvm2 partition, which is what I did (perhaps foolishly because I know nothing about it). The link simply says to select the 'Ubuntu system partition', but I don't really know what this would be in my case: Install Screen 2 (this shows the screen following selection of 'Something else' on the first intsallation screen; there should also be a /dev/sda3 entry of about 500GB below /dev/sda2, which presumably houses the lvm partition)
If I was to select the second entry (/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root) as the root of the file system to be installed (which is my suspicion at the moment), I am unsure what to select as the device for the boot loader installation: would it be /dev/sda or /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root?
The extraneous partitions /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 are boot partitions which I had because I used UEFI, but I am now realising this was probably unnecessary and they can likely be removed. My swap partition has never worked, but I am less fussed about solving that atm.
Some possibly useful specs:
$ uname -a
Linux matthew-ThinkPad-W540 4.4.0-57-generic #78-Ubuntu SMP Fri Dec 9 23:50:32 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
