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, 2:04 PM
> Leonard Chatagnier wrote:
> > -- On Sat, 2/14/09, Nils Kassube
> <kassube at gmx.net> wrote:
> > > 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.
> 
> Yes, that's it - you could even leave away the "-t
> ext3" because mount is 
> intelligent enough to determine that on its own.
> 
Thanks, so much. The only trouble I had was to determine
what the uuid is for /dev/sdb3.  But, a little googling on uuid
turned up blkid which I had forgotten about. Google is your
friend-:))

> > 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?
> 
> It will only be automatic if you have an entry in your
> fstab - something 
> like this:
> 
> UUID=c1aa6372-bf97-4269-b6ae-0f2de85b0a52 /home ext3
> defaults 0 2
> 
I thought so.  Thanks for confirming.

> And don't forget to replace the UUID with the one from
> your partition - I 
> won't give you my disk from which I stole the fstab
> entry.
> 
Arrh, then I would have 3 HDD in this old Dell PIII Dimensions XPS t-450.
One can always use another hard drive especially in an old machine-:0))

> > Well, that's 2 
> > questions actually-:))
> 
> I think you mean 4 - there are 3 '?' after the
> /dev/sdb1 :))
> 
I just count the questions(sometimes wrongly) not the marks-:)  Thanks, so
much Nils, for the appreciated help. You did neglect to answer one or the 2
or 4 questions though-:).  Can I recover the /home dir in the / partition if I now
unmount the /dev/sdb3 /home partition?  Only one q-mark-:)  Just curious as
the /home partition is working ok but wonder if one in / is gone forever.


Leonard Chatagnier
lenc5570 at sbcglobal.net