Question about moving /home

[kgriff]

I'm attempting to move /home on my wife's computer to a different partition. I'm following the psychocats tutorial at http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/separatehome
When I get to point where I'm moving all of the files from /home to the new folder, and I execute
find . -depth -print0 | cpio --null --sparse -pvd /new/ (in my case it is /mnt/newhome)

I get the following:
cpio: cannot make directory `/mnt/newhome//./username': Permission denied
cpio: /mnt/newhome//./username/.pulse/volume-restore.table: Cannot open: No such file or directory

I get this for every file and directory in /home. I have tried running the command as sudo, but I'm note even prompted for a password.

Can anyone help?

[wmcbrine]

When I've done this is the past, I just used cp:

cp -a -x /oldhome /newhome

if I'm remembering correctly (but consult the cp man page for yourself).

[flabdablet]

find/cpio is old-school standard practice. It's worth knowing how to use cpio if you're going to do any admin work on Unix boxes that don't have the GNU toolset installed; non-GNU versions of cp quite routinely do the Wrong Thing.

In any GNU/Linux system, including Ubuntu, cp -ax will work just fine.

[Dogalot]

I have a simular question (or maybe not). Recently my GDM became corrupted, and I needed to reinstall 9.10. It created a new partition. I can use the Disk Manager to get to the other partitian and see the files, but I am unable to do anything with them. I'd like to change the permissions so I can burn them onto a CD (to back them up), then wipe the whole drive and start over. I get the same message Permission Denied.

I can log into the old version, on the old partitian in terminal... but I don't know what commands to use to make all the files available to the 'new' system.

Can anyone help?

[oldfred]

This has instructions:

You need to make a mount point and mount it with correct permissions or change permissions after mounting:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount/

$ sudo mkdir /Data
$ sudo mount /dev/sda5 /Data
where sda5 needs to be your drive, partition
if not known to list partitions
sudo fdisk -l

If you cannot read and write then change the permissions.

$ sudo chmod -R 777 /Data
sudo chown -R fred:fred /data
where fred should be your name