hi, Really being stupid lately, I tried partitioning with partitioner in installation. I based my partition scheme on a proposed scheme. I have a swap, and larger partitions (reiser) one 37 GB and one 121 GB. I set the mount to point of the 121GB to /home and when I checked the hdd had two /home directories. Why wouldn't the installation noticed that I already had one picked out? To top the icing on the cake I deleted the /home directory while being the user it was made for. All I want is one home directory separate from the rest of the system in the event of a reinstall.

Distro is suse 10

Let's not confuse partitions and directories.

First, you can have a zillion */home directories hung at various places in the tree. I don't think it's possible to have more than one "/home"
Note that "home" is also the nickname for your home directory---typically /home/username
Confused yet?????

I think what you want is a partition that is separate from all others, which will be mounted at either /home (all users), or /home/username (you only). I would actually go so far as to make it a separate physical drive.

Another variation is to have a "data" drive (partition), which is mounted--eg--to /home/username/data For dual-boot installs, this can be formatted FAT32 for easy access from Windows. In this way, all the config files and local binaries can be in a Linux filesystem.

Are we going roughly in the same direction??

I would like a separate partition to have all my personal (one user) files so if I have a problem and need to perform a reinstall then this partition would stay intact. Why would I wan to have two /home directories for one user?

I agree that you would not want this, you can't do it, and I did not suggest it....!!!!

Now, what DO you want? Did you understand my post? By "one-user files", do you also mean your personal configuration files? These will be re-created when you do a new install. You DO, however, need to protect (eg back up) things like mail files.

I want to have all my music, documents, videos, program packages, pictures and anything else like that separate.

I would also like set new user premissions everytime I reinstall.

I think what you want is a partition that is separate from all others, which will be mounted at either /home (all users), or /home/username (you only). I would actually go so far as to make it a separate physical drive.

This is what I want, but just for one user. I do want all the files that would be in my /home directory in this separate partition.

I also just wanto partition the disk. Not have an entirely separate drive.

ok, so cd /home/<you>
that is your personal "space" there can only be one /home period....now there can be /home/<you>/home/home/... or /home/<you> /home/<me> ...
what are you trying to do?

Assumign you want the whole of /home on a seperate partition:

copy all the files currently in /home to the partition you set up then use /home as the mount point for the other disk.

so

mount /dev/drive_partition /home

add an entry in /etc/fstab so the mounting is performed every boot .

As for new permissions, i dont think you'll be wanting to change them, you'll still want the executables executable and the documents writable by you etc. perhaps you'll want to change the owner and group though, look into chown and chgrp (man both for detailed info). Or once you install the OS again you could recreated the user (with correct uid) and the group (corrct gid) and it should all be good.

Now how do I do this during the install? And will I have a /home(dir) on the othr partition as well?

all you have to do is mount the partition that has the files you want to something like /mnt/tempHome then cp /mnt/tempHome/* /home/<you>/ and that will copy all of your personal files to you "new" home. then you can use that old partition for whatever you want.

So during a install I could have a 160 gig hd. Then I could make a 10 gig / filesystem and then a
1 gig swap and then a the rest for /home?

Now doing this at install I would create / as a primary partition and / would be the mount point using a reiser filesystem. Then I would create a ext 2 1 gig swap partition, this would be an extended logical partition. And then finally create a thrid partition for all my files (reiser). This is what I want for my home directory.

Now this is all at the install, and I am still at creating the thrid partition. Now after I have allocated space for this directory to hold my home partition, all I have to do set my mount point for that partition to /home and then when I reboot I will only have 1 home directory one my entire computer?

I am not interested in copying my whole home partition over to that thrid partition after the install reboot. Would I have to in my senario or is the OS smart enough to place all my files,that belong in /home, over to that partiton. Or must I do this manually? is not creating the mount point at boot suffice? Also how does one check to make sure there is only one home partition on their system? and when looking at the directory tree would home appear as it was under the / partition but really be on it own?

Ok and if I have to copy the whole directory over would I then delete the old one, and if the part I mentioned about looking at the directory tree is true how would I even know if I have copied the /home or not?