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!A brief HOWTO on moving your '/home' folder to another partition (or back again). REQUIRES INTEGRITY/READINESS/CONTINUITY CHECK ON PROCEDURE BEFORE GENERAL USE!!! ---- !First off: !!!BACK UP IMPORTANT DATA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ---- !! Overview: * Move '/home' to a Temporary '/home' Partition * Format Old '/home' * Delete/Recreate Partition ('/home'_old and '/home'_new) * Move Your Data Back. ---- !! Lets do it! #Create new '/home'_temp partition and format, then quick integrity check: *'cfdisk /dev/xxxx' * REBOOT!!! - is this really needed? *'mkfs.ext3 -c /dev/xxxx' * REBOOT!!! - is this really needed? *'fsck.ext3 -c /dev/xxxx' (Extra -c redundant from mkfs -c?) #Move/redirect '/home'_old to temp partition/drive, *'<your-fav-text-editor-here> /etc/fstab' * Locate the line with '/home' in it. * Carefully remove the '/dev/xxxx...' at the beginning, and replace with that of your newly created temp partition. * SAVE! * This is where we mount our new temp dir: * 'mkdir /media/xxxx' * This mounts our temp EXT3 partition to our previously created mount point '/media...' etc: * 'mount -t ext3 /dev/xxxx /media/xxxx * Copies (recursively) our user data from old '/home': * 'cp -R /home/* /media/xxxx' * Check our copy worked OK: * 'diff -r /home/* /media/xxxx' * If any errors are output from the above step, they SHOULD? (NEEDS CONFIRMATION!!) be noted in the output from 'diff'. #Delete/Reformat old '/home': * Remove original user(s) from the /home folder (stops the system getting confused later when we re-add them?!?) * 'userdel user1'...user2...etc' * Nuke old partition - make sure you delete the right one!!! * 'cfdisk /dev/xxxx' * REBOOT!!! - is this really needed? * Create new partition from free space from old one * 'cfdisk /dev/xxxx' * REBOOT!!! - is this really needed? #Move/redirect user/data/mount-point back to original partition * Edit '/etc/fstab' to change your '/home' entry from '/home'_old to '/home'_new * SAVE!! * REBOOT!! #Profit!!! !!NOTES: 1) Turns out, if you log on as root/single user in recovery mode, you can put stuff from /home into /root - because when logged on as root, this is your /home folder? On Ubuntu at GRUB screen - hit ESC/select Ubuntu xxx.xx.xxx (recovery). 2) Every change/write in fdisk/cfdisk needs a reboot? Same for partition formatting?!? 3) Something I discovered: After recreating /home, then doing an 'adduser xxx', then logging in as that user, my permissions had changed... I was running as a more restricted user than previously. Turns out, apparently Ubuntu has the first non-root user account with additional 'special' permissions - seeing as I removed all users bar root, then recreated that first user, it took a reboot for that users permissions to come right... 4) I had a spare partition (1) (blank drive space) available, so I put my temporary '/home' there while I reformatted my old '/home' partition. I pretty much did everything as 'root' user - I think I should be using SUDO, but I haven't grokked? that concept yet :-)
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