Basil's question (move home to separate partition and restore working system)

[Israel]

Hi Basil,
I wanted to move this to a new thread, so it would be easier to spot in
people's inbox :)

OS/2 eh?  I remember using that for a while.  Unfortunately that was
during the time of MS' big move to control the market.  And well, they
did.  They are still trying to, however the advent of the smartphone has
seriously jeopardized their chances.... much like Netscape Navigator did
with IE taking over the internet (and Firefox does still against MS and
Google taking over the free web)

Regarding moving your home to a separate partition in a 'working' install:

The potential for data  loss is very real in this case.  No matter what
you decide to do, you should BACKUP your home partition to whatever
media you have (USB/SD/external HD, etc...)
This is something we should all be doing fairly periodically either way.

So, here is some reading material for you.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Moving

This seems fairly straight forward.

But, if it were me, I would simply backup my /home and reinstall.
See this for some info:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DiskSpace#Separate_.2BAC8-home_.28optional.29
and here is one with screenshots (albeit older, but still relevant)
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/installseparatehome

The main consideration is that you will have to use the "Do something
else" option if you choose to reinstall from a disk ever again, and set
it up the same.
something like:
17Gig partition mounted at /
32 Gig mounted at /home
1 Gig swap partition

You can of course try the first method, and if it does not succeed you
have a backup of your home anyway, and can simply reinstall.

But don't share your home partition with other distros... there are lots
of issues that could creep up that way, unfortunately, especially using
your ~/.config directory

Your ~/.config directory is the one that holds the configuration files,
and may be the culprit of your current mess, though it might simply be a
mess of incomplete things installed.

hope this info helps your restoration process

-- 
Regards