Change mount /media/username to /home using fstab didn't work

[qianian2]

Hi, I forgot to set my home partition to /home mount point during a clean reinstall so it automatically was mounted at /media/username.

Instead of starting over the reinstall, I defined the UUID in fstab, mounted, then changed /media/username to /home in fstab and mounted again. At first all the files disappeared from all the directories involved. After reboot, I have the default empty directories in /home and nothing under /media. Even the partial backup I made in a new folder (/media/home) disappeared.

I'd really appreciate an explanation of what might have happened. Please let me know any additional information I can post.

Thanks and be safe, everyone.

[TheFu]

Post the fstab file and the passwd entry for the users of the system.

Also, the file system for HOME must be capable of supporting Unix permissions, so NTFS or any of the FAT-whatever file systems cannot be used.

Any existing files that were _under_ the /home/ directory will be hidden of another partition is mounted over it.

[qianian2]

Thanks for the help. I'd appreciate step-by-step instructions for further action.

/etc/fstab follows. I added the last 2 lines. The home partition is ext4

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=39d20bad-b9bd-45ed-a709-531b9e3a5b66 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=af6172b2-c4a3-443b-8a40-b21fb3cb6a97 none            swap    sw              0       0
# (identifier)  (location, eg sda5)   (format, eg ext3 or ext4)      (some settings)
UUID=18eecef8-913b-4019-abce-3e06f69b10df   /home    ext4          defaults       0       2

/etc/passwd

speech-dispatcher:x:111:29:Speech Dispatcher,,,:/var/run/speech-dispatcher:/bin/falsewhoopsie:x:112:117::/nonexistent:/bin/false
kernoops:x:113:65534:Kernel Oops Tracking Daemon,,,:/:/usr/sbin/nologin
saned:x:114:119::/var/lib/saned:/usr/sbin/nologin
pulse:x:115:120:PulseAudio daemon,,,:/var/run/pulse:/usr/sbin/nologin
avahi:x:116:122:Avahi mDNS daemon,,,:/var/run/avahi-daemon:/usr/sbin/nologin
colord:x:117:123:colord colour management daemon,,,:/var/lib/colord:/usr/sbin/nologin
hplip:x:118:7:HPLIP system user,,,:/var/run/hplip:/bin/false
geoclue:x:119:124::/var/lib/geoclue:/usr/sbin/nologin
gnome-initial-setup:x:120:65534::/run/gnome-initial-setup/:/bin/false
gdm:x:121:125:Gnome Display Manager:/var/lib/gdm3:/bin/false
keizen:x:1000:1000:Keizen,,,:/home/keizen:/bin/bash

[TheFu]

Does /home/keizen exist?
is it owned by keizen?
Were the files in /home/ moved onto the new storage prior to the new storage being mounted over /home?

What does ls -al /home/ show? Please use code tags when posting that output.

[qianian2]

~$ ls -al /home/total 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 keizen keizen 4096 Mar 30 17:48 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 root   root   4096 Mar 30 13:11 ..
drwxrwxrwx 19 keizen keizen 4096 Mar 31 09:40 keizen

Where the files in /home/ moved onto the new storage PRior to the new storage being mounted over /home?

Do you mean where did I move the default files in /home after clean reinstall? I didn't touch them. They were empty directories, same as what I see under /home/keizen now.

Thanks again.

[qianian2]

Iirc initially the permissions for /home/keizen were drwx------ and I used chmod to try to view hidden files. Obviously no luck.

[TheFu]

Those permissions are bad. You want:

/home$ ls -alF
total 44
drwxr-xr-x   5 root   root    4096 Sep 22  2019 ./
drwxr-xr-x  33 root   root    4096 Mar 21 09:12 ../
drwxr-xr-x   3 keizen keizen  4096 Sep 22  2019 keizen/
drwx------   2 root   root   16384 Feb 28  2019 lost+found/

See the root:root and permissions?
See the lost+found/ directory? That gets created whenever a new file system gets created. Not seeing one in the output above means that /home/ didn't get mounted.

On my box, using LVM, /home is mounted as, df -Th

/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-home--lv ext4   74G   20G   51G  28% /home

Because i use LVM, on an SSD, the fstab looks like this:

/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-home--lv /home  ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime 0 2

i used mkfs -t ext4 on the /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-home--lv to create the ext4 file system. if the file system didn't get manually created, then that disk is probably formatted NTFS. To check/verify, run

lsblk -e 7 -o name,size,type,fstype,mountpoint

As you can guess, i'm using a shotgun method of troubleshooting.

[qianian2]

Not seeing one in the output above means that /home/ didn't get mounted.

Is there a chance I can mount it after all?

/home$ df -Th

Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev           devtmpfs  3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs          tmpfs     785M  1.7M  783M   1% /run
/dev/sda1      ext4       19G  6.5G   11G  38% /
tmpfs          tmpfs     3.9G  115M  3.8G   3% /dev/shm
tmpfs          tmpfs     5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs          tmpfs     3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/loop3     squashfs   92M   92M     0 100% /snap/core/8689
/dev/loop2     squashfs  1.0M  1.0M     0 100% /snap/gnome-logs/93
/dev/loop1     squashfs  3.8M  3.8M     0 100% /snap/gnome-system-monitor/135
/dev/loop0     squashfs   45M   45M     0 100% /snap/gtk-common-themes/1440
/dev/loop4     squashfs  3.8M  3.8M     0 100% /snap/gnome-system-monitor/127
/dev/loop5     squashfs  161M  161M     0 100% /snap/gnome-3-28-1804/116
/dev/loop7     squashfs   90M   90M     0 100% /snap/core/8268
/dev/loop6     squashfs   49M   49M     0 100% /snap/gtk-common-themes/1474
/dev/loop8     squashfs   15M   15M     0 100% /snap/gnome-characters/399
/dev/loop9     squashfs  1.0M  1.0M     0 100% /snap/gnome-logs/81
/dev/loop10    squashfs   55M   55M     0 100% /snap/core18/1668
/dev/loop11    squashfs  4.4M  4.4M     0 100% /snap/gnome-calculator/704
/dev/loop12    squashfs   55M   55M     0 100% /snap/core18/1705
/dev/loop13    squashfs  4.3M  4.3M     0 100% /snap/gnome-calculator/544
/dev/loop14    squashfs   15M   15M     0 100% /snap/gnome-characters/495
/dev/sda5      ext4      202G  1.2G  191G   1% /home
tmpfs          tmpfs     785M   48K  785M   1% /run/user/1000

My bolded line worries me because I should have way more than 1.2 G used in that 220 GB home partition. It is, however, ext4, so I still don't understand why my fstab procedure didn't work.

$ lsblk -e 7 -o name,size,type,fstype,mountpoint

NAME     SIZE TYPE FSTYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda    232.9G disk        
├─sda1  18.6G part ext4   /
├─sda2     1K part        
├─sda5   205G part ext4   /home
└─sda6   9.3G part swap   [SWAP]
sr0     1024M rom

Thanks.

[TheFu]

Iirc initially the permissions for /home/keizen were drwx------ and I used chmod to try to view hidden files. Obviously no luck.

There aren't any hidden files on Unix, just files/dirs that begin with a . aren't displayed for convenience. Seeing them is trivial.
ls -a

Looks like the missing lost+found/ is a 1-off. The partition is definitely being mounted to /home/.
What, exactly, is the issue? i seem to have lost track. Appears that sda5 is mounted on /home/ from here. i'm a little worried there isn't a lost+found directory in /home/lost+found.

Did you fix the permissions using the example provided?

[TheFu]

Do you mean where did I move the default files in /home after clean reinstall? I didn't touch them. They were empty directories, same as what I see under /home/keizen now.

They aren't empty. There are some .dotfiles and .dotdirs in there. Don't trust any GUi. They lie. Use ls -a to see what's in any directory.

To find missing files, use ls -alR and du -h * to see where stuff is. To see .dotfiles/.dotdirs, we need to use careful regex patterns. du -sh ~/.[a-Z]* will show most of them.