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

[Israel]

Hi Basil!
I highly sugegst youtry my initial suggestion
open a tty  (Ctrl+Alt+F1)
login, then:

sudo mv ~/.config ~/config_backup
sudo mv ~/.cache ~/cache_backup

then

sudo restart lightdm

or alternatively

sudo stop lightdm
sudo start lightdm

Then it should work.... however some of your application specific
settings will be gone.
you can experiment moving each folder back from config_backup to .config

Hope this does it for you.

Also you may need to move some other hidden files if you have edited
them by hand
in your home directory

On 09/13/2014 05:00 AM, Basil Fernie wrote:
>
> Hi Israel,
> No problem with the new thread, Just wasn't expecting to see my name
> up in lights so soon in life...
>
> Your suggestions were probably good, but I had this problem with 20GB
> spare to hold 3 versions of a 30GB folder... I followed up the links
> which were again addressing a slightly different and "easier" problem,
> namely how to shift your /home partition at or after installation. My
> problem is however how to "capture" an existing /home on that is
> already on a different partition. But by pursuing the downlinks I
> found some interesting stuff which after testing out I may be able to
> summarise for some other coutios user. It did not get as far as
> telling me how I could do what I wanted to do safely.
>
> So I did some selective trimming and clipping and backed up /home to
> an already full external drive and copied a carefully selected portion
> to the LXLE partition so I could use Opera without extreme
> contortions, hence I am able to reply to your email.
>
> Then I tried to install Lubuntu 14.04.1 "over" the failed
> installation, with preservation of /home. The installation failed in
> the last 5% of "Restoring previously removed packages", i.e. right on
> the last lap of the installation marathon. There was a warning that
> the desktop manager was not working. The installation booted, to a
> black screen with a conky. I could get a terminal window by
> right-clicking on the desktop, and presumably could have replaced the
> faulty or missing desktop manager with a command or two if I had a bit
> more insight. I repeated the attempted installation with Lubuntu
> 12.04.3 and with LXLE14.04, with exactly the same results. So I am
> concluding that in that /home that my greedy eyes are fixed on, is a
> poisoned desktop manager which I don't want to be accessed by my
> working LXLE installation on the small partition.
>
> So my problem has changed; all the installation DVDs have good desktop
> managers as evidenced by fault-free live runs, but already on the hard
> drive partition in probably the /home is a vicious evil desktop
> manager. How can I destroy this dragon that guards Sinbad's cave full
> of software jewels and my precious archival data?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Basil
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:06:17 +0200, Israel <israeldahl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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