Did you make sure that you let it format that first partition and use it
all. It would then have made its own patitions in that part of the HD.
If you set up three partitions it cannot use a different partition.

You should have copied the files as a back up.

Yes, I did that, but perhaps this is my misunderstanding. There has
been
a lot of comment on here about setting up a Home partition so I thought
-perhaps wrongly - that the bulk of of my own software would live there
and allow the operating system to be updated as needed and still be
able to access the files in Home.

The home partition, (or directory if it is set up by the operating
system), is for personal data files, not software. It does contain
software settings but I think the software files are under /usr. So to
keep on using your home directory you would have to choose a custom
installation and manually select the correct partitions for /home and
/boot.

Your personal files, settings, pictures, videos are still probably
safe there in the original partitions. You just can't access them from
the /home that was automatically set up by the installation. I'm not
sure how to make the new install access them, short of a new custom
installation as above.

Yes, they are certainly there - and I had
backed them
to an external drive in case of mishaps. But I guess that I have a
complete misunderstanding of the whole file system. I imagined
(dreamed) that the OS would live in in its own partition/directory
and could be upgraded without losing access to other software.

What I see is that app's like browsers, email handlers, media players
word processors etc. etc. actually reside with the operating system
and need to be re-installed after the OS installation.

Only data is preserved in the Home folder. Apps are part of the Root
directory and can't be kept from version to version when a clean
install is done. There are ways to generate a list of apps and
automate their re-installation on the new install but I've never
learned to do it. A search of the group archives should bring you
instructions for that as it's been discussed several times.

The reason that installed programs get wiped when you do a clean install
is that many fundamental files (glibc, binutils, gcc most particularly)
change from release to release. Any changes in these files can break
the other programs which rely on them. There's also the problem that
programs fall out of the repositories with each release and so there's
no way Ubuntu can tell whether or not the versions of libraries,
compilers and linkers that its installing are compatible with the
installed programs.

Now, I know that you're not updating to a new release, just reinstalling
the one you already had, but unfortunately, the installer isn't
intelligent enough to work this out or to work out whether or not it
needs to update a given program or whether it can keep it - I suspect
that this would be a fairly major undertaking to implement and would
severely reduce the amount of space available on the live CD - so it
takes the safer (and easier) option to simply nuke the system and
reinstall over the top.

The upgrader used to be the same, but is now much more intelligent and
will update any programs you've installed, where possible, when you
upgrade from one release to the next.

You might want to have a look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
(especially if you have a bout of insomnia!) which explains how the
Linux filesystem is arranged and why. It can be found at
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

My take on re-using the /home directory is that not only data is stored
BUT if one re-installs programs after the upgrade or re-installation the
original format of the user's setup will return. For example if one
re-installs Thunderbird all the mail, addresses etc. are there without
problems. This is, of course if one uses the same user-name and distro
to setup the computer. I'm sure this applied top any configured program,
the configuration remains and is reused when re-installing. That's
another plus to keeping a separate /home directory.

Absolutely. The upgrade/(re)installation does not touch the user
configuration data in /home - unless, of course, you explicitly tell the
installer to format /home for you or to set up a different default user
- so it's still where any programs you install expect it to be (unless
the Ubuntu team have changed the location of the configuration data,
which they have done once or twice).

I think it is both, the OS does contain a lot of things like basic
FireFox,
and other tools. For instance my Application list shows a list,
Accessories
Games
Graphics
Hamradio , this gets added by the system when I add some
applications for use
in ham radio or short wave radio listening.
Internet, has some things like firefox, but if I add say Opera
browser it will go there and
be there unless I do a reload, and then I would have to reinstall it, my
setting would still be in
my home folder though. Same happens when I install Thunderbird, my email
client, my settings
are in /home, if I upgrade to 10.10 on my laptop with a fresh install, I
will have to reinstall
Thunderbird, but my settings will still be there.
Office, comes with Open Office, any setting you make to your
environment will be saved in
you /home, but upgrades to OO will go to the OS folders in /bin.
Sound&Video, contain some default things like Rhythm box music
player, and a couple of
others, if you add more they will be here, but another fresh install
will not have them and you
would have to reinstall manually.
System tools, can be added to but mine doesn't show anything
but what I added.
Wine, not a default, I added from the repositories, and on
another fresh install would not
be there until I reloaded it and all of the applications from
Windows I wanted.
> What I see is that app's like browsers, email handlers, media players
> word processors etc. etc. actually reside with the operating system
> and need to be re-installed after the OS installation.
>
We all had to go through this even us that have been doing it a while,
each version of linux
has some things done differently and have to be gotten used to.

If connected to the Internet while upgrading any need for upgrading
applications is done and you will find the programs as before. If
however you are not connected then they are wiped out. That at least is
the results I have had.

I think I have covered this in another email earlier, but /home
just needs to be mounted manually as a sudo mount command.
The trick is finding out what it is called by the system.
Easiest way is find it in the places list and double click it to get it
mounted, then in a terminal enter the mount command and it will be
mount as something like /dev/sda?/media followed by a long series of
numbers which are the system ID of the disk partition.

Just a side note, typing the command "blkid" in terminal will list the block
devices (drives/partitions with block readable memory) by UUID and
corresponding /dev/partition if you would like to set up your /etc/fstab
manually. My understanding is that the UUID is used for more complex
systems with many drives and/or partitions. Under varying conditions, the
partitions could be given different /dev/partition designations by the OS.
Using the UUID in /etc/fstab ensures the correct partitions are mounted in
the proper location regardless of what label the OS has given the partition.

Yes, thank you , that *would* explain why my system uses UUIDs in
its fstab - one internal drive and two external.

Glad to help. I've learned a lot from this group and it's good to give back
what I can.

There may be a misunderstanding here. If you allow the install CD to create
the system automagicly, yes it uses the whole disk. Notice the work
automagicly,
sometimes the magic goes wrong, or different from what is intended. When it
uses the whole disk it does create two partitions. Root or / and swap,
which is
unformated raw disk space. Usually at least the same size or twice the
size of
memory. On a single user system it is nice to have three partitions, or
more
depending on it use. On my systems I keep only three, / or root, home
mounted
as /home and unmounted swap. I keep root about 8 GB on both my 200 GB laptop
because it has a part of it with windows. On my 40 GB Desktop upstairs I
only have
Ubuntu 10.10 and it again has three partitions. Those being root and
home and
unformated swap. It has been this way for about 6 months now and I have
loaded
Ubuntu's 8.04, 9.04. 9.10, 10.04 and 10.10. I have also loaded Debian,
Fedora, Mepis,
and Suse. Only to go back to 10.10 of Ubuntu. All keeping the same /home
partition.
For each of the loads above I formated root leaving home unformated and
in the
installation portion there is an easy to miss part to mount home as
/home, if left
blank, you will have to do mount it manually, where it will get put into
the mount
table for future use by the system at boot time.

Not quite right. If you make the partitions manually you can label them
and load the root on the / partition, and then keep the /home to reuse.
Now as in Gordon's case on the first go around you have to create the
required partitions manually. The system will create a /home folder with
nothing in it. After the system is up you need to go find your created /home
partition and mount in as /home. Once you do that you can cd to /home and
you will see a directory of Lost+Found, and there you can create the /home
directory as in my case it is my initials "meh", if more than one user
then their
home directory would be put there by the administrator. On a large
system you
could have several /home directories, for different departments for
instance.

Did you explicitly tell the installer to use your /home partition as
/home? If not, then it won't be listed in your /etc/fstab file and so
won't be mounted on boot. Instead, your new install will have created
its own /home directory within its own partition.

The relevant entry in my fstab looks like

# /home was on /dev/sda6 during installation

UUID=96039346-f682-4090-8389-03e0fa01859b /home ext4
defaults 0 2

Why the installer insists on using UUIDs to ID the drive, I don't know.
You can simply substitute the appropriate /dev/sdxx entry for your /home
partition and it should work. fstab must be edited as root (sudo gedit
/etc/fstab).

You may have to mount the /home partition manually the first time.
Look in places and see if there is a file system listed with the size of
/home. If you click on it, the system will mount it and show it on the
desktop. You can then look at the contents from the GUI, double click
it from the desktop, or in a terminal window cd to the location and do
an ls -l on the contents. If it is you /home file system, you can then
use the mount command to manually mount it as /home. Once you
have the file system mounted you can, in terminal you and issue the
command "mount" and the system will show you what is mounted
where. That file system will be mounted by the system as something
like this my boot file system which is my windows partition:
> /dev/sda1 on /media/BOOT type fuseblk
> (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096,default_permissions)

I hope this helps and not makes it more confusing. I ran into this same
issue one time when I was trying different version of Linux looking for
one that would allow use of the sound card while listening to my short
wave radio. Came back to Ubuntu 10.10 on that system.

Here is what I think the solution is :

The install program does not realize that you have a separate partition for your
/home directory, and therefore has put the /home directory on the partition that
it use to install Kubuntu in. Why is this the case, to prevent the installer
program from erasing wanted data. Think of it this way what if you have multiple
/home directories, the programming required would become very complex, and that
is what manual partitioning is for, and that means no automatic partitioning by
the installer at all what ever you tell the installer to do it does. With all
that written hears how I would approach the problem.

Since you have your data backed up, I would reinstall the Kubuntu 10.10. During
the Kubuntu install process I think third screen in, and the last choice to
manually repartition your hard disk, and that is the choice you want to use. Now
on the hard disk which one is installing Kubuntu to, one needs to reformat two
partitions

1. root partition ' / ' needs to be reformatted. This is where your new
applications will be installed, which is what you want, the updated stuff. Just
select the partition and from the drop down menu choose ' / ' , and the format
check box should have check automatically.
2. Do not reformat partition ' /home ', and this is where you have installed all
your data, which you have backed up to the hard disk. You have to select this
partition and from the drop down menu select /home, and do not click on the
format check box.
3. last partition is ' swap ' partition. Just click on the format check to
format this partition, which should all ready be created.

I have never used automatic
partitioning in several years of working with Linux. I did the whole
exercise manually, first by using Gparted to view the existing partitions
and then used a good ISO disk to set things up as I wished - that is with
Root, Home and Swap partitions.

My original query was that I had not really thought about what was going
to happen, but it is all fixed now.