Restore /home partition

[toontastic]

I followed some instructions many moons ago in the Linux Format magazine to create a partition for my home directory. This all worked fine and I have a nice partition which feels safe and can be backed up dead easy. This was a good job as a few weeks ago Ubuntu died. Rather than fighting to fix the problem I decided to format and reinstall which worked great and now Ubuntu is happy again.

The problem is this, since reinstalled I now have a drive which contains all of my old home directory and the home directory which is created when I installed ubuntu. How do I go about removing the newly created home directory and make ubuntu use the 126gb partition as the home folder ?

Thanks in advance. :KS

[forger]

you should change the /etc/fstab file:

gksu gedit /etc/fstab

for example:

# /dev/sda3
UUID=f5c288aa-acd3-48e7-9217-e2dc412f3de3 /home ext3 defaults 0 2

You change the UUID number to match the partition you want it to use.
You can find the partition's UUID (unique id) using:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

[ugm6hr]

For future reference, when reinstalling Ubuntu, use the "manual" option with LiveCD (or use Alternate), and simply select your /home partition as /home mount point (but ensure the "format" box is unticked).

That way, after reinstalling, your old /home will be ready to go...

[toontastic]

For future reference, when reinstalling Ubuntu, use the "manual" option with LiveCD (or use Alternate), and simply select your /home partition as /home mount point (but ensure the "format" box is unticked).

That way, after reinstalling, your old /home will be ready to go...


Thanks for that I'll try and remember that next time.


Thanks also for the details on how to change my /home about, I've not been near that computer for a while I'll try and get it done shortly and I'll let you know if it all worked.

[toontastic]

Ok I finally got round to trying this but it didn't seem to work.

I went into fstab which looked like this


# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sda5
UUID=94cb0b3d-a167-4094-915f-18e880baa7fe / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sda6
UUID=567d86fb-7077-4e6c-bed2-2371640405a1 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

So as you can see no mention of /home so I followed your other terminal link found the UUID code and added the line


# /dev/sda4
UUID=12c07134-d4c4-414e-a6d8-73e3cc395a4b /home ext3 defaults 0 2 to just above /dev/sda5 but after a restart I got nothing new and the /home folder is still wrong. Any ideas ?

[toontastic]

Ok I did a full restart of my machine as in turning it totally off and turning it back on and it worked. Problem is I'm now back with the same problem I had before I had before a reinstalled ubuntu.

Basically I've lost the advanced desktop effects which kills the rest of the machine.