Move your home directory to its own partition
There are some reasons why you may need to move your home directory to its own partition, it could be because you run out of space, or because you may want to share it with another distro in a dual Linux boot installation, well lets start.
Preparing the new partition
This may be different in your environment, in my case I will do in the same disk, just in another partition, but you can use a complete new and different disk for you /home directory.
Gparted
If you do not have gparted, install it with
sudo apt-get install gparted
the call it with:
gksudo gparted
then use gparted to create and format your new partition
Once created and formated, it is time to move your /home
You may need to resize your / "root" partition to make enough room for your /home partition, or use another disk for it.
Moving your home directory
First logout from GNome or KDE, press Alt+F1 and login as root.
Follow this steps
mv /home /home.bak
mkdir /home
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda3 /home
cp -a /home.bak/* /home
Remember to change /dev/sda3 and ext3with your own data
We need one final step,
Open your /etc/fstab file, and add this line, in my case it is /dev/sda3 but could be different for you.
/dev/sda3 /home ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
It there were a line for /home in you /etc/fstab file replace it with the new data.
with this finished, just reboot your system and enter as usually.
Important note
Remember to back up before using gparted if you are resizing your disk to make room for the new partition
Updated: Thanks to my Friend for some advices about how to improve this article.
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What is the missing command
What is the missing command after "Now we need to assign the new permissions to the recently created /home directory." ?
Sorry, for that, please read
Sorry, for that, please read now, It was a mistake on a html tag not closed. :( so sorry.
Guillermo Garron
This is not the way to do
This is not the way to do this. The copy step should
be
cp -a /home.bak/* /home
This will preserve permissions and symbolic links,
and recurse through sub-directories.
Agreed! cp -a is the way to
Agreed! cp -a is the way to go on this one to make sure you preserve your permissions for your files, etc. And I know in my home directory I have some files which are not my user owned so if you do a chown -R after copying this will wreck your previous differences in permissions that you may currently have. I also like to use verbosity so that way I can assure myself things are progressing, especially if you have a large home folder - it is more reassuring than just watching for a prompt return.
Changing the cp command to
Changing the cp command to
cp -a /home.bak/* /homepreserves ownership, permissions and timestamps during the copy. IOW the corrective chown action becomes obsolete!
And after verifying that everything worked out as expected, that no data got lost, etc, you can remove /home.bak altogheter and reclaim some free space on your root partition.
It is also wise to do such administrative operations in single user mode for exactly the same reasons you tell to logoff from your X session.
> cp -a /home.bak/* /home
>
cp -a /home.bak/* /home -RFrom the fine manpage:
| -a, --archive
| same as -dpR
Therefore, -R is superfluous. Also, it is better to write down the options *first*.
And please note that neither
ext3nor/dev/sda3will suit every user in themountcommand.I think better to use
I think better to use dd.
opensourcedevelopment.net
just migrated my home to its
just migrated my home to its own partition and this guide helped to encourage my first steps. good guide, perhapse u can add rm -rf /home.bak so people would free their root space.
hese partitions are normally
hese partitions are normally not re-sizable (making one larger and the adjacent one smaller) The purpose of GParted is to allow the individual to take a hard disk and change the partition organization therein, while preserving the partition contents.
Ok, I get all those steps
Ok, I get all those steps except the "login as root" part. How do you actually do that? I'm told that "root cannot login" even though I set a separate password for it than my user account.
Hi, are you using
Hi,
are you using Ubuntu?
Guillermo Garron
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