Paths, home directories and partitions?

[geo]

I asked this question also on Launchpad but I'm asking here because I might get a better answer.

So last night I reformatted my hard drive to make OS upgrade/replacement less painful when it's necessary (8.04 on the CD was haunted, it would NOT behave at all so I went back to 7.10).

Here's how I did it.
100 gig drive.

3 partitions, two of them are visible when I go to Syatem Monitor/File Systems.
-partition 1 = /dev/sda1 = / = 15 gig ext 3 for / (this is where the OS lives)
-partition 2 = /dev/sda3 = /media/sda3 = 83 gig ext 3 for user crap (our "home" folders)

-[partition 3 = 2 gig swap (because I have 2 gig of ram in this box)]

But I noticed that if I go to Places/Home or Places/Pictures the system thinks it should be looking at partition 1, where the OS lives.

So of course that path has no pictures in it while /media/sda3/"user"/Pictures/ is loaded with gigabytes of old family photos, which is what I want!

I tried to argue with it. In System/Administration/Users and groups, I set under each user the path (under "User/Properties/Advanced") to point to what I believe to be the proper place.

I've restarted, I've shut down and restarted again. But it still seems to want to look in the wrong direction for the user's home folder.

Should I be putting the /dev/sda? think into Users and groups instead? How can I make this improved?

I really don't want to meld the two partitions back into one - it makes for such a mess when I have to do anything like upgrading or installing the OS.

I'd rather the OS be more modulal so all of our data (about 60 gig of music, movies, pictures, kids and our stuff too) doesn't have to get wiped when the OS needs a spanking.

What can I do to convince it, other than dump the computer into the lake or turning it back into a Windoze machine (EEK)?

Thanks,

geo

From: Eugene Cormier <eugene.cormier at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Better way to install/upgrade?
To: yaktur at yahoo.com, "The Canadian Ubuntu Users Community" <ubuntu-ca at lists.ubuntu.com>
Date: Wednesday, June 25, 2008, 10:07 AM

Geo, what I do is I reinstall the OS with a new home directory and then
in your home directory view hidden files (ctrl+h) and copy any folders
that I want to save settings to....for example the .mozilla folder will
keep everything to do with firefox

and using the partition scheme you talk about will keep all your
settings


cheers
Eugene
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