I'm pretty much a novice with Linux. I can usually find what I need on my own, but I want to try something that could potentially wipe about 5TB of data, so I'd like some more advanced input before I try.
I have a file server at home that I initially set up with Ubuntu 10.04 Server LTS. It has 5 HDDs using mdadm for RAID. I have three partitions: one for swap, one for OS, and a large one for data. Recently I upgraded to 12.04, and a couple days ago I went to 14.04. Along the road, I've cluttered the system trying stuff out, like kubuntu-desktop. I'd like to clean that up, and ideally I'd like to just do a clean install. I don't know anyone with 5TB free that I can backup my data to, so I'll only try that if I can do it without losing any data on that third partition.
So the question is, can I run through a clean install and reuse my swap and OS partitions and just mount that third partition with all data intact (no initialization, format, etc)? I'd even be open to another distro if there's one that has an easy way of doing that.