I wanted a separate partition for /home. So the sda5 partion in this was mounted /home. The sda6 partition was mounted as /
The SUSE 10.3 installation, which works beautifully, however has made itself a sub-directory sda6:/home and is writing the contents of /home into two places, with sda5 acting more like a backup.
This does not make sense.
So the questions are:
What happened?,
Can I fix it by removing sda6:/home somehow?, and
Do I need to re-install?

Thanks
mack

If I understand correctly, you want /dev/sda5 to be /home and /dev/sda6 to be / (the root of the filesystem).

So, do the following:
a) if /home (/dev/sda5) has the files you want to keep as /home, and if that /home has your user directory, then delete the contents of /home on /dev/hda6 (leaving the /home folder empty to serve as the mount point for /dev/sda5).

b) edit /etc/fstab to make an entry for /dev/sda5 /home

c) mount /dev/hda5 /home

From now on, when you boot up, /dev/hda5 is /home.

If you have trouble deleting the files in /home on /dev/sda6, try booting from a liveCD to do a) and b), then reboot without the liveCD.

As already pointed out, you have to change /etc/fstab.

I don't think that Suse did maintain two home directories at once. It is rather that your own home mounting overlapped the existing home directory on /dev/sd6. If you unmount /dev/sda5 you will see different contents in home.

Using the same mountpoint multiple times is possible, but only the last mount can be accessed at a given time (it follows the push-pop method). Nice way to hide the contents of a directory, though.

GWN

Well, I can only hope that you're not working as root all the time, that would explain why your root partition is being used as a home partition.

can you post teh output of the
command please