How do I copy home directories back?
 

I've just had to reinstall Mandrake 10.0, but I carefully copied off the two home directories to another disk first.

I rather hoped it would just be a matter of recreating my two userIDs and copying the home directories back in place, but I get a whole host of error messages when I try that - Evolution complains about broken config files, some programs (e.g. xmms) just refuse to run, and others complain about lack of permissions.

I've tried doing a "chown -R" to reset ownership of the copied home directory to the new account, but that didn't help much.

I guess I'll have to go through and reconfigure applications manually - i.e. set userIDs up from scratch with a new, blank home directory, then run Evolution for the first time, configure mail accounts, then try to import mail and contacts from the old config files, then do the same with Opera, and so on.

But if I need to reinstall Mandrake again, is there a simpler way of preserving home directories, application config files and so on?

Cheers,
G

Not sure, did you copy the entire contents of the directory including all the dot "." hidden files and directories?

I ran 'cp -R' on the directory itself - yes, it did take the '.' files with it (e.g. .bashrc)

Are the UIDs and GIDs the same values between the two installations?

I'm not sure... I can check what the UIDs & GIDs are for the new users I've just created, but not for the old ones of course!

Is there any way I can check what the old UIDs and GIDs were from just a copy of files that were assigned to those UID/GIDs?

ls -l might give you a clue or if you have the old copy of /etc/passwd. Seeing as you've done a chown it might have wiped out all the evidence.

If you can't work it out from the evidence start again, assuming you've still got the original copies of the home directories. This time recreate just one home user and get that working if it is a UID/GID problem it's a lot easier working with just one home user than two.

See http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=145615