[SOLVED] Attaching an additional hard drive to /home

MusicalCoder · 03-20-2017, 06:07 PM

Hello All, and here is my situation!

I have a fresh install of Ubuntu Mate on a new computer. The computer came with a single 1TB hard drive, but I added 2 240GB SSDs.

I have it set up that 1 SSD is root (/) and the other is home (/home).

Now what I'd like to do is attach the 1TB drive (which is currently unmounted) to be able to be part of home. I would like to move Downloads and Pictures and Videos to the 1TB drive, and keep Documents and dot (.) and Desktop on the SSD.

How would I go about doing this?

GlennsPref · 03-20-2017, 06:41 PM

I do this too, and have done for a long time now.

to make "Downloads and Pictures and Videos" appear as
natural you would need to create partitions for each of them.

What I do is list the partitions in fstab under the folder /home/glenn/local
Mine are just file archives.

I needed to create that folder first as a user, glenn:glenn in my case.

Just do it as a user, not root.

This does not work too well if you remove the drive and try to boot,
it will likely stall if you don't comment out the lines in /etc/fstab.

/etc/fstab

Code:

# Entry for /dev/sda6 :
UUID=38d0dacd-7aa5-47e0-9909-ae2737fa65c6 / ext4 defaults 1 1
# Entry for /dev/sdb1 :
UUID=5700c7a2-2f60-4dcd-9832-b09bfb447fe5 /home ext4 defaults 1 2
# Entry for /dev/sdd1 :
UUID=4a78a18b-27f1-41a5-9911-761d0ecb3489 /home/glenn/local/archive ext4 defaults 1 2
# Entry for /dev/sdc4 :
UUID=1e503f23-697d-4340-8de6-d6a3ee4a6792 /home/glenn/local/media ext4 defaults 1 2
# Entry for /dev/sdc1 :
UUID=255c2d5e-4be3-4e09-a27c-cce5a95d3e60 /home/glenn/local/stuff ext4 defaults 1 2
.....
snipped
.....

there might be another way to do this.

any questions, please ask.

hydrurga · 03-20-2017, 08:24 PM

Another approach you could consider is to mount the HDD at some point in the filesystem (say /media/hdd), then create the Downloads, Pictures and Videos directories in your home directory as symbolic links to similarly named directories on the mounted HDD.

Something along the lines of (delete ~/Videos first): ln -s /media/hdd/Videos ~/Videos

Note that the ~ acts as shortcut to entering the full path to the current user's home directory.

MusicalCoder · 03-20-2017, 08:36 PM

I've marked this solved, and thank you to hydruuga for most of the inspiration on this...

After further research, here is what I did...
1) The drive was already formated in XFS - did that in the install - it just wasn't mounted.
2) Used lsblk to show that the drive was unmounted and in /dev/sdc1
3) Used blkid (as sudo) to get the UUID for sdc1
4) Edited /etc/fstab with vim and added UUID={the uuid} /mnt xfs defaults 0 1
5) rebooted
6) verified with lsblk that sdc1 was now mounted to /mnt
7) used chmod 777 /mnt so that I could read, write and execute everything in /mnt
8) since this was a clean install - all my 'concerned' folders were empty so in /mnt I used mkdir to add Downloads, Videos, Music and Work (I personally use Work - not a defaulted folder)
9) then under /home/me, I rmdir those same folders
10) then ran hydrurga's ln -s command for each folder in question!

Thank you very much for your help in solving this!