just tried, no problem whatsoever, thanks! :)

A small note though:
I selected recovery mode in grub an chose to "drop to root shell" for the "login as root" part ;)

I haven't tried this yet, but how about replacing cp by rsync? This will also copy all hidden files from /home.bak to /home, while preserving timestamps, ownership, permissions, etc. The *new* home will be an exact replica of the *old*:

# rsync -a /home.bak/ /home

Of course, you may have to install rsync, which is straightforward in most GNU/Linux distributions. In debian-based distros, just

apt-get install rsync

or

aptitude install rsync

Please tell me what you think.

Thanks, I just moved home to a new partition. All is well and I am a happy camper.

Thanks for this!
It worked perfectly. I used it to move my home directory to the 16GB SSD on my eee 901.
Cheers

Hi,
Thanks. Your guide is perfect, i successfully did it and now my linux OS partition has 5.5 gb free space and home directory has 28 gb free space.

The advice workes, I use EEEBUNTU on a eeepc 900, and can now use the 16 GB solids state as an home drive.

thanks for this poosting

I thought the point of having home on a separate partition was so data was left alone when reinstalling and the home partition didn't need reformatting. I reinstalled Kubuntu and my data was still on the home partition but a new home directory of 10 GB was formed with nothing in it(not sure where this 10GB comes from as there was no spare left on the disk). So even though the installation was the same and the home partition unformatted the home directory is renewed and the old data needs remounting. You may as well just back the data up and do a complete reformat when reinstalling ?

Also, does anyone know why my alt-F controls would not work on the keyboard ? I am using standard English keyboard layout.

regarding to "login as root" just do like this example

hannah@pysen:~$ sudo passwd root
Enter new UNIX password: [passwd of your choice]
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully

then su as root

hannah@pysen:~$ su -
Password:
root@pysen:~#
done!

Matti

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.

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.

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.

I think better to use dd.
opensourcedevelopment.net

> cp -a /home.bak/* /home -R

From 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 ext3 nor /dev/sda3 will suit every user in the mount command.

Changing the cp command to
cp -a /home.bak/* /home
preserves 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.

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.

What is the missing command after "Now we need to assign the new permissions to the recently created /home directory." ?