Hello all,
I have opensuse 10.3 and have noticed that there are 2 partitions that have my home directory. Why is this and can it be removed ?

Thanks Eldon

Do you mean there are two separate disk partitions with the same contents? Are they both mounted? Do you have any idea how this cam about?

What do

#mount

and

fdisk -l

show?

Point out the partitions in question.

Check with the mount command and your /etc/fstab file. It could be that you have the same partition (filesystem) mounted twice on two separate directories. If that is the case, deleting the files on one will delete them on the other since they are actually the same.

If you meant to say two Desktop directories, that can happen if you have a dual head setup with independent displays.

hello,

It might be useful to see the output of the 'df' command plus also "billymayday's" request of fdisk, and i'd probably say post the output of 'cat /etc/fstab'. And also to run an 'ls -ald' on both of the directories (just incase we not talking actual partitions here)... ie

ls -ald /home
ls -ald /home_duplicate

regards
MJ

this is done automatically in opensuse and yes it is in fstab as / and /home...

What is done automatically? Would you like to answer any of the questions you've been asked?

the fstab entries / and home are done automatically in opensuse and this is where /home is duplicated. sorry for not making this clear. been asleep as I work grave yard so not able to answer till now...

Do you mean you have 2 entries for /home in fstab?

Can you post fstab for us?

Ok here is my fstab file as it is done with opensuse, I have not modified this at all.


/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_WDC_WD800BB-00FWD-WCAJ91916769-part2 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_WDC_WD800BB-00FWD-WCAJ91916769-part3 /home ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_WDC_WD800BB-00FWD-WCAJ91916769-part1 swap swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST310212A_7EG0X816-part1 /sbd ext2 user,noacl,user_xattr 1 2



my home dir is in both / and /home and the / dir is getting full.

Thanks Eldon

No, you've lost me.

Do you mean that "/" is getting full

Note that *nix uses mount points for partitions, and /home in you setup is a mount point for part3 (I hate the suse naming). I assume that is /dev/sda3 in most distros. "/" itself is on part2.

On many systems, /home is just another directory, but you have a separate partition mounted. Hence if "/" is getting full, it's somewhere else (often /var), but

#df -h

will tell us a lot.

Rgds

If your directories are getting full i also find that something like 'du -h --max-depth=1 /' can be very useful in being a quick way to drill down onto the area where a large amount of data seems to be getting stored. There maybe other ways as well for nistance with the 'find' command you can also search for file/directories that are over a certain size for example. But from this point of veiw i normally find a partition that appears to be getting full from the 'df' command. 'cd /that/partition' and then 'du -h --max-depth=1'

Helps me on all occasions i've needed it i think, but yet output of 'df -h' most useful!
Cheers,
MJ

ok here is df-h and I just noticed that my second hd (sdb1) is also backed up in / (sda2) partition...what the hell!!!

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 9.9G 8.0G 1.4G 86% /
udev 253M 124K 252M 1% /dev
/dev/sda3 62G 18G 42G 30% /home
/dev/sdb1 9.4G 406M 8.6G 5% /sbd

Eldon

No, sdb1 in mounted under /sdb, not the same thing.

Think of partitions being disk drives in themselves (even though they're not). In Windows parlance, C: is a partition, as is D:, etc.

Now each partition is a defined size (as is a disk), so think of your /home being a separate disk, but mounted in such a way that when you navigate to /home, you are automatically operating on that partition without realising it. Hence when you write to /home, you are writing to a different partition than the "/" partition. The fact that /home ins "under" "/" is irrelevant.

In a sense, think of /home as a link to another partition. That partition could be another partition on the same disk (as in your case), could be a separate disk entirely, or even on a remote server.

Back to windows, there really isn't the same concept - C & D are always separate entities, although you can have a link between the two.

I hope that makes a bit of sense - I don't feel like I've explained it very well.

Back to your initial issue - I'm not sure you have one.

HTH

BM

so I should not be concerned that / is 86% full? are you saying the duplicate /home dir is a link? How can I tell for sure? also sdb1 is a second separate HD that all files are also on sda

I just went over your last message and you are missing the point...I know that /home is under / but I have home in / and in /home both. One is 10gig in size (/sda2) and one is 61 gig (/home sda3). also in sda2 are all the files on sdb1 which is a completely separate HD. Hope this helps.

Issue the mount command with no arguments to see what is mounted at which point in your file system.

And do, please, try to understand that Linux and most other modern operating systems have a single, monolithic, file system where devices, network connections, printers, disk drive partitions, etc. are all just "directories" in the single file system. For historical reasons (basically, backwards compatibility) Windows and older IBM operating systems have separate file systems for devices and disk drives, but there is no longer any practical or technical reason for making that distinction.

And, on that point, you have "missed the point." You do not have 'home" on two drives. You have one file system, and "home" is mounted in the single file system (called "/") as "home" at "/home." Other parts of "/" including "/" itself, are mounted from a different partition.