I want to move everthing in my /home/tardigrade to a new drive. Would it be logical to copy it to the drive then delete the orig and set my drive to mount at /home/tardigrade. Is this going to cause any problems? thanks for helping.

Yes that should work fine.
Format the drive and make a new directory. Then use cp -a /home/tardigrade/* /mnt/home/tardigrade. Then re-name /home/tardigrade /old/home/tardigrade and then edit your /etc/fstab to mount your new /home partition and check that everything is ok. If all is fine delete the old /home.
A useful reference can be found here .

problems.... i did a cp -a /* and none of the hidden files copied. so basicly everything program link is dead. all the other files seemed to work fine with permissions and all that junk but i cant figure out how to cp the hiddens.

Did a bit of searching and * seems to be the cause. Try cp -a /home/tardigrade /mnt/home/tardigrade . That should resolve the problem I hope.

There is a very good guide for moving the /home directory here:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...-partplan.html

dropping the * does make sense since -a passes a recursive command. Unfortunately im impatient and resorted to a drag and drop copy of all the hidden stuff. Things went really crazy until i logout and back on so all the apps could restart (esp. kde). it seems to have worked though. to anyone who plans on moving there home drive in the future read the thing m_yates linked to and when using cp dont use a wildcard(*).

because it is annoying when people dont..
RECAP:
su for root access
prep new partition. make it and stuff. figure out its name (ill use /dev/hdb1 for ex.)
mkdir /mnt/hdb
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb
cp -a /home/user /mnt/hdb
(dont forget the -a as it sets the reclusivness and keeps the permissions the same)

move /home/user somewhere like /home/old/ until your sure you can kill it.
umount /mnt/hdb
if its busy close anything related to it.
still doesnt work type fuser /dev/hdb1
this should tell you whats using it. if it shows up with anything do a kill 'PID'
still wont umount try: umount /mnt/hdb -l (as in L for lazy)
then edit /etc/fstab for the new partition so it mounts to /home/user
type mount /dev/hdb

you may have to restart kde(assuming your using kde). just logout and back in.
also if things go wrong as they did for me(see posts) open up konq. and click show hidden files. there should be a bunch of the in you home folder.

your /home/ should have a new home.

thanks again
tiger and yates/