Directories need to be empty to mount on them; either make this so or set your ntfs partition to mount elsewhere

So if I understand you correctly, you are trying to use an NTFS partition as your home directory? This seems like it should be possible but you'll need the files from your old home directory.

1. Unmount the NTFS volume.
2. As root mv /home/barth{,.bak}
3. As root again mkdir /home/barth.
4. Chown /home/barth to match /home/barth.bak
5. Remount the NTFS volume.
6. cp -pr /home/barth.bak/* /home/barth.bak/.[^.]* /home/barth

Be careful, if you screw up at some point there is the possibility you can lose your data completely.

Regards,

Alunduil

Just for informational purposes: directories do _not_ have to be empty to mount a device on them but if you do mount a device on a nonempty directory all files that were in that directory will be *unavailable*. They will not be deleted or removed but they will not be accessible from that mount point anymore.

Just to continue the fun with mounting devices, you can mount one device in several mount points including underneath of itself (why you would do that I don't know). Thus mounting over other mountpoints or directory locations can give a diverse and easy to manipulate runtime experience. Especially, when you couple this idea with pam_mount.so.

Regards,

Alunduil

Quite, but it makes a certain amount of sense to assume this

And also be wary of cyclical mountpoints. I lost a hard drive because of these, chroot, rm -rf and idiocy once.

mv /home/barth{,.bak}

Could you break this down for me? What's the {,.bak}?

I have a bad feeling about this - NTFS is still proprietary. That means the folks that provide us with Linux support do a fantastic job, but can't guarantee anything. We still don't have a fsck last I looked.
What I would suggest (and do) is to keep /home as a Linux f/s, and use NTFS for a common data partition to share stuff. Just mount that somewhere convenient.
That way if something happens to the NTFS you can still login and play (on Linux). And yes I do (also) keep a root user handy ...

The {,.bak} is a BASH argument vector (shorthand) that means /home/barth /home/barth.bak. Just easier than writing out the entire path twice.

I agree with syg00's concerns but if that's how you want to setup your machine I'm more than willing to tell you how to do it with a big fat warning label of CAUTION. I think if you're using ntfs-3g you'll be fine as I've never heard (although I don't really listen to anything Windowsish) of NTFS being a problem FS with it.

Regards,

Alunduil

Okay, I'm running slackware. I followed the six steps suggested. Now I've got a folder in my /home directory highlighted in green as follows:

System\ Volume\ Information

owned by root.

In my /home directory in X (as root) I've got the folder, "System Volume Information" containing "MountPointManagerRemoteDatabase" and ""tracking.log".

When I run chown -R barth /home/barth I "cannot access /home/barth" (no such file or directory). I've already run userdel, useradd and passwd for the user barth.

Data loss isn't a concern since I'm really just experimenting with Linux for now. I anticipate reinstalling slackware several more times before I'm comfortable with it. But to save time, is there an easy way to reset my home directory to an empty directory that still serves as my de facto "home directory."

Just copy and modify the permissions of /etc/skel. That's an empty home directory template.

Regards,

Alunduil

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Cool, thanks!

Would that just be "cp /etc/skel /home" or do I need certain options?

You would need -r for recursion but other than that you should be fine.

Regards,

Alunduil