Not new to Linux but beginning to think I will always be a command line newbie.

Basically My main OS is Debian Sarge on HDb. I have Etch on HDa. I want to copy my Home directory in Sarge (HDb) to Etch (HDa) and replace the current Home directory in Etch.

Sounds easy and when I first started my RTFM and Googel trip a month ago that is what I thought but all my efforts have failed. I give up. I'm just not going to figure it out so can someone tell me how? My biggest road block seems to be permissions. I keep getting permission denied even though I am root.

I could tell you what I have tried but it's not working so I figure rather then try to fix what isn't working for me to just ask for a how to of all the steps.

Have you tried the obvious ? and tried to copy one to the other?? it might be that you'd need to use an arguement/switch with the cp command to get one to the other or something like that.

Theres a link in my sig that explains how to decypher man pages, but I'd have thought that man cp should tell you what you need to know.

regards

John

First, be sure you really want to get rid of your Etch home directory, or, better yet, back it up first.

For the following, I am assuming you are currently booted into Sarge and that your /home directory on Etch is not a separate partition, and that / is on /dev/hda1. The following is best done as root.

1. If you don't already have a temporary mount point, create one. I will assume this is at /mnt/temp. If not, adjust the following accordingly.
2. mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/temp
3. rm -rf /mnt/temp/home
4. cp -a /home /mnt/temp

I think that should do it. If I have made a mistake, let me know what went wrong. Or if /home is on a separate partition, let me know, as I don't think the above will work for that.

, Fresh install, worse case situation will reinstall.

Yes. Thank you. Will post back when I have had a chance to try it.

IBM put together an excellent tutorial on how to move /home. Highly recommended

Yes, I found a couple of those tutorials in my search but they are for moving to another partition and my attempts to adapt them to replace one Home directory with another never succeeded. Thanks though for trying.

Prependto whatever commandline steps you are taking... as root of course. As far as I know, init 1 gives you the dumbest computer you can possibly have, so nothing should be using anything in the home directory which would give you an error if you try to move or delete it. Other than that, I don't know what to tell ya... it should work.

If that doesn't work, then we'll need to know exactly what you're doing and what the errors are.

Let us know.

I'm confused, you originally said
/dev/hda = primary master
/dev/hdb = primary slave

If you just meant that you wanted to switch "/home_etch" and "/home_sarge", then just copy the contents to a temp directory, copy the contents of one "home" directory to it, clear it, then copy the data from the other directory to it. Something like the following ought to do it.

mkdir /home_temp
cp -R /home_etch /home_temp
rm -rf /home_etch
cp -R /home_sarge /home_etch
rm -rf /home_sarge
cp -R /home_temp /home_sarge

Ok let me explain another way. Right now the OS I use everyday is Sarge on HDb (primary slave.) That is a bit awkward when I'm experimenting with different Linux OSes so I want to switch my everyday OS to HDa. I thought I would use this also as an opportunity to upgrade Debian to Etch. I installed Etch on HDa (Master HD on Primary). When I get my Home directory moved and everything working I will Fdisk Sarge and use HDb for experimenting.

Hope I made it clearer. I was just trying to keep my original post as short as possible. Perhaps I left out to many details. Sorry.

For the most part that worked. Had to do one odd thing to get it to work but it worked with only a couple of glitches. One I understand. Mozilla doesn't work because it was opened when copied and parent lock was also copied.

The other is the KDE menu bar at the bottom isn't normal. That may just be a settings problem. It does work. Will spend a week or so on that then if I can't get it I may post back.

Thanks to all who posted.