Preserving /Home Partition

[Leonard Chatagnier]

-- On Sat, 2/14/09, Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net> wrote:

> From: Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net>
> Subject: Re: Preserving /Home Partition
> To: ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> Date: Saturday, February 14, 2009, 2:16 AM
> Leonard Chatagnier wrote:
> > I just finished reinstalling Hardy, up to date, on an
> IBM 13 G
> > drive that had the / Partition corrupted by fsck. Went
> to some
> > length to prove the drive was not faulty and the drive
> has worked
> > for several days since the reinstall. In doing so, I
> used the Alt.
> > CD, reformatting the / part and preserving the /Home
> partition and
> > also reformatting swap. Have done this on this same
> machine on a
> > replacement HDD successfully but this time I find
> /home in my / part on
> > the IBM drive. Is there a way to change things so that
> the original
> > preserved /home partition on the IBM HDD will be used
> instead of the
> > one in / part?
> 
> You can mount the preserved /home partition at /home of the
> new HD. Then
> you can't access the files in the new /home any longer
> but I suppose that
> is no real problem.
> 
> 
Thanks Nils. That sounds simple enough that I probably should
have thought of it myself but didn't. Just to be sure I do 
understand let me recap:

sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb3 /home

where ext3 is the formatted fs and /dev/sdb3 is the /home partition.

I understand that once I do this, I wont be able to use the /home
dir in my / partition on /dev/sdb1(swap is /dev/sdb2). If the above
is true, I have only one question:
If for some reason the /home partition, /dev/sdb3, is corrupted all I have to do is to unmount /dev/sdb3 and upon rebooting I'll be using the /home dir in /dev/sdb1???  Does anything have to be put in fstab
or is that done automagically with the mount command?  Well, that's 2
questions actually-:))  Thanks for a reply.  BTW, I've mounted /dev/sdb3 on /mnt and can read it well enough so it does appear to be
in good shape.

Leonard Chatagnier
lenc5570 at sbcglobal.net