New Home Partiton now a Nightmare - please help.

[Wootyeah]

I noticed a thread by Madeinbrazil who appears to be having the same problem as me, but I didn't want to hijack his/her post by complaining about my problem.

My problem is this:

I tried to make a new home partition on my 2nd hard drive (Dedicated to Linux only), following the psychocats tutorial.

Everything *seemed* to be going okay until I rebooted, then the fun began:

Blah! Error! Something about permissions!

Man.

So somebody told me to edit my fstab file to fix that.

Here is my fstab file:

unionfs / unionfs rw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/sdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0

My new home partition SHOULD be on sdb as sdb3.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


I love you Ubuntu!

[cariboo]

Can you post the output of:

sudo fdisk -l

Your /etc/fstab makes no sense. If you could paste the whole thing in your next post.That would help also.

Jim

[meanburrito920]

if you can access the other drive, go to it and sudo chown -R your home directory to your user

[Wootyeah]

Here is the output:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 74.3 GB, 74355769344 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9039 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x4446a53f

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 9039 72605736 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3084991d

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 14822 119057683+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 29646 30401 6072570 5 Extended
/dev/sdb3 14823 29645 119065747+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb5 29646 30401 6072538+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$


I am not sure how to chown -R my home directory to my user ( I think I know what it means, but I just don't have the command experience to do it without asking for some help). I was smart enough to get into this mess, but I'm not sure I'm smart enough to get out

If I have to reinstall, *sigh*, I have to reinstall.

Oh - yeah, umm...well, that was sort of all of my fstab. *cries* - I really don't know what I did...

unionfs / unionfs rw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/sdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0

I won't be able to check this post again until tomorrow at about this time most likely. Thank you both so much for the help.

[meanburrito920]

you wont need to reinstall. run this:

$ sudo chown -R NEW_OWNER HOME_DIRECTORY

just replace new_owner with your user name, and home directory with your home directory.

[Wootyeah]

Well, I did try it a couple of different ways:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo chown -R user /dev/sdb3/home
chown: invalid user: `user'
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo chown -r user /dev/sdb3/home
chown: invalid option -- r
Try `chown --help' for more information.
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ chown --help


My username should be user, and this should be the location of my new home partition. Any ideas?

[madeinbrazil]

meanburrito920 gave me the same tip. Running from the live CD terminal it didn't work. But, I went inside the recovery mode for my Ubuntu installation then I typed it in and it worked

I had placed the /home back into the main partition though, following the recovery steps in the psychocats tutorial.

[meanburrito920]

It should work on the other drive, just make sure you replace the USER name with your actual user name, otherwise it won't find the user. And, as madeinbrazil said, you need to run it from recovery mode.

[Wootyeah]

Well,

I had taken recovery mode off the GRUB menu. Is there any way to get it back?

Meanwhile, I'll research it.

[meanburrito920]

boot up as normal, and when it crashes, press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to the command line. enter the commands from there.