Moving Home
 

Hi,
Here's the scenario ~ My desktop computer has an SSD with Windows 10, an internal HDD with Linux Mint, I have an external drive (250GB) that I keep all my personal stuff on, music, docs, pics etc & there is another external drive which is connected & working but not used.
What I want to do is this ~ I don't use Windows any more which means I have an SSD sitting doing nothing, I thought it would make sense to have Linux mint on the SSD with the Home folder on the internal drive that Mint is currently on.
This internal drive was automatically partitioned when I installed Mint as follows ~ Dev/sdb1 69.89GB Dev/sdb2 74.51GB Dev/sdb5 4.66GB
The SSD which is currentl the Windows C drive is 60GB

So far so good, problem is I don't have a clue as to how to proceed with this. I have Googled "Moving the home folder" & watched some video's but I got lost.
The problem is a lot of accomplished Linux users tend to assume we newbies understand what they are talking about & say "simply do this or do that" & frankly it just as well be written in Chinese. What I need is step by step simple instructions in plain English that I can follow, after all if It's easy to follow it means I will understand it & be able to carry out the procedure which in turn means I have learned a bit more about Linux & maybe in the future I might be able to help another newbie. So please if anyone can help I will be extremely grateful.
For the record I understand that any information given is free & well intentioned & I am honestly grateful to anyone that replies, it's just that it's sometimes hard to get my head round if it's not easy to follow, so thanks to all & here's hoping.

first of all you need to do this "from the outside" - you have to reboot your machine and boot some live system.
have you installed mint from a usb? still have that usb? that will do.
there's more dedicated live system maintanence distros out there, but any ol' live system will do.

this hurdle taken, i suggest you take it step by step, the first being: identify the windows partition, delete it.
chances are your system won't boot after that, but no panic: from aforementioned live system, you have to issuebut you have to identify the hard drive that your system boots from (replace XXX).
usually it's "sda", but to make sure, type "sudo fdisk -l" and try to find out yourself.
if you can't, post the output of that last command here.

of course, you can also solve large parts of this by making web searches.

edit:
chances are, grub won't work because your system is using efi secure boot watchamacallit.
there's about 10.000 threads right here on LQ covering & solving that topic, but i'm personally not so good with it.

Hi,
I am currently in a Live Mint DVD, I have typed sudo fdisk -l in a terminal & it gives me the following output

Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x7acc25c3

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 2048 146563071 73280512 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 146563072 302815231 78126080 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 302817278 312580095 4881409 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 302817280 312580095 4881408 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdd: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x52d03597

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 * 2048 625136436 312567194+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT


I also opened gparted & got this additional info

/dev/sda1 ntfs sytem reserved 100.00 MiB
/dev/sda2 ntfs 55.36 GiB
/dev/sda3 ntfs 450.00 MiB
unallocated 1.90 MiB

Awaiting further instructions from you. Thanks.....

Should I be typing sudo grub-install /dev/sda or sudo grub-install /dev/sda1 or something else ?

I hope you can take all these stupid questions.

Thanks...

this.

Excuse my ignorance but what exactly do you mean by "This" ?

Are referring to your original post in which you stated "first of all you need to do this "from the outside" - you have to reboot your machine and boot some live system.
have you installed mint from a usb? still have that usb? that will do.

I do have have my system running from a live dvd at the moment, what next ?

i had to add "this" because the forum software doesn't allow me to post a quote alone.

anticipating your next question, i quoted myself from post #2, because everything else i described and you answered, is based on this first step, which you ignored.
without it, my whole post doesn't make much sense, and neither do your answers (posts #3 and #4).

Which version of Mint are you using? Mint 13 and 17 are currently supported, is it one of those? If not, don't bother just install new.
Your initial post is a little confusing. You state that you have windows on an SSD and you want to move the Mint system partition to that drive but leave the /home partition on the drive you currently have Mint on. In the next paragraph, you say you googled "Moving the home folder" when you actually don't want to move the home folder but the system partition.

How are you booting Mint and windows now? Are you using Grub? Which drive is it on? Generally, Grub will install part of it's code to the MBR of the first drive which in your case shows as the SSD with windows on it (sda) and your Mint is on sdb so can you clarify exactly what you want to do. Also, is your windows 10 an upgrade from an earlier version of windows and is it still using MBR to boot or UEFI?

More detailed information would be useful and you could get that by going to the site below, downloading and running the boot repair script and posting the output here. Make certain you select "Create BootInfo Summary" as you do not want to make any changes to your system.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

Ok I have deleted my Windows partition sda & then typed sudo grub-install /dev/sda & the terminal has reported the following error

mint@mint ~ $ sudo grub-install /dev/sda
grub-probe: error: failed to get canonical path of `/cow'.
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install.real: error: failed to get canonical path of `/cow'.

Wow so many questions. OK I'm using Mint 17.2. The reason I googled moving home is simple, I thought I could move the home folder maybe to the external drive temporarily thus preserving all my system settings then reinstall Mint on the now vacant Windows SSD then move Home folder back to the drive that Mint is currently on thus leaving me with The main Mint system files on sda1 with home on sda2.

To clarify following your initial instructions sda1 is now unallocated space, grub still works, I don't know which drive grub is on & not sure yet how I find out, Mint boots fine at this stage but grub still lists Windows 10 even though it's gone.

Windows 10 was an upgrade but as it's now gone I doubt that matters any more. My Bios is legacy not UEFI.

I have not tried this boot repair software yet as I'm not sure if it's required.

What would happen if I now install Mint to sda1, as that would mean I had two Mint installations sda1 & sda2 & the new installation presumably would not use the home folder on sda2.

that's fine, it's just a leftover entry and will go away once you issue "sudo update-grub" from within your mint installation.

i have to say, i'm sorry if you understand my posts to mean "this-is-how-you-do-it-step-by-step" sort of walkthroughs.
they're not.
you always have to check things before proceding to the next step, and if you can't do that yourself, you should show us some output.

right now i just have to take your word that your windows partition is gone.
now would be a good moment to post that "sudo fdisk -l" i requested earlier.

The Windows installation has definitely gone, sorry to go over the same ground but do I need to do the sudo fdisk -l from a live disc or from within Mint

from within mint.
it shouldn't matter either way, but i think we can put the live disk aside for now.

Within Mint should suffice.