Is it possible to have two distros sharing the same /home partition

felicehome · 05-21-2004, 11:01 AM

for example Mandrake 10 and Fedora Core 2

everything goes on the same HD extra partition for /home
both Distros sharing the same /home partition or will /home get corrupted ?

Regards Felice

b0uncer · 05-21-2004, 11:17 AM

as far as I know, there's nothing that could prevent that. simply do a partition for /home, and install the distros and things should run ok.. that's because usually distros don't install anything "important" into /home, but it's reserved for users' own files..

nukkel · 05-21-2004, 11:17 AM

It should work without a problem. However, when you install the second distro DO NOT let it reformat the /home partition!

felicehome · 05-21-2004, 11:19 AM

thank u for your reply b0uncer and nukkel,

my fear is the following:

I add a user in my first distro, which automatically creates a folder /home/user
How do I tell the other distro to use this folder?

Maybe I'll just try and post my experience.

vasudevadas · 05-21-2004, 12:27 PM

In my experience, when reinstalling Mandrake, it asks me to add users and I add the same usernames that were there before the reinstall. If I did not tell it to reformat the /home partition then it seems to use the /home folders that existed before, i.e. if I previously had a user "richard" then it uses the /home/richard folder that is already there and does not delete it and create a new one!

Probably wouldn't hurt to back your home folder up just in case, of course!