so if my mount point / files up what happens? as you can see from prior posts this is at 86% but there is still 60 gigs free on the drive....is the partitions resizing automatically?

I understand that the / mount point and /home are on the same drive. But what I don't understand is why / has all the file in it and it is only 10 gig and /home which is a 62 gig partition has only /home/"user" files. The / mount point even has files from a separate drive.

I think I have figured this out. what I was going on was in opensuse 10.3 if you click on the my computer it shows sda2 and sda3 as separate partitions but I don't think they are. At least they don't show up in any other utility that way.

Thanks to all who worked with me on this. Now I can't wait to get opensuse 11.1 on the 18th
Happy Holidays to all.

Eldon

You haven't yet understood how (wonderfully) the linux filesystem works.

Your / partition has a /home directory in it.
If you just mount your / partition the /home directory will work, but it will be limited by the max storage of the partition mounted at / which is 10GB.

The cleverness comes when you (or the system, via an entry in fstab) mount a different partition to the /home directory: What was in /home "disappears", it is still there, but is no longer seen. Instead, it is replaced by the contents of the partition that is now mounted at /home.

For example:

My eee701 only has a 4G root partition: /dev/sda1
The OS takes up most of that, so there is very little room in /home.

So I have permanently plugged in a SD card of 16GB and I mount that over /home with an entry in fstab like yours.

So I can put 16GB of data into the directory called /home but it is actually stored on the partition /dev/sdb1

If I power it down, remove the SD card, and boot it up again, /home is still there (but 16GB of files are not).

/home is just a directory, or mountpoint, and you can mount anything there:

If I wanted to, I could have my /home appear in the root filesystem perfectly normally, when in reality it is of many Terabytes, on another server (runing nfs) thousands of miles away.

Linux is awesome. But it takes a while to get your head around it. Then you think "That's a really sensible way of doing things".

... You posted whilst I was composing - hope you get it sorted out.