The Plan

Ok, so today I'm going to take the plunge and upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The problem? Well, I've got a rather freaky hard drive setup.

There are three applicable drives. Two 500 GB drives, and one 200 GB drive.

Originally, I only had the 200 GB drive, and I had Linux and Windows both on it. However, I got the first 500 GB drive, and decided to put Windows on there when I upgraded to Windows 7.

But, I was starting to run out of space on my Linux drive after a while, and the Windows drive had plenty. So I shrunk the NTFS partition on Windows by 100 GB, and when I upgraded Ubuntu at some point in the past with a fresh install, I made the 200 GB drive and the 100 GB space on the 500 GB drive both LVM2 partitions, merging them together into a larger, 300 GB logical volume, where I put my ext4 filesystem for Ubuntu.

I then got another 500 GB drive, and formatted that as LVM2 as well, and merged that in with the 300 GB (800 GB total).

Now, from 11.04 to 11.10, I didn't do a fresh install... I did the online upgrade thing. However, my computer has been having odd problems ever since (for example, sound only works exactly every other boot), and while they aren't significant enough to make me ditch Linux or anything drastic like that, they're enough that I want to do a fresh install for the LTS release.

Now, I've only used about 8.6 GiB of space on the second 500 GB hard drive, so I've moved about 12 GB of stuff over to a thumbdrive I have. I'm now going to use Knoppix to resize my ext4 filesystem and remove the second 500 GB drive from the LVM group, and format it as a plain ext4 partition, and dump all my documents/other files on it.

Then I'm going to install Ubuntu.

Any suggestions?