made new "/home" partition with Yast2, now KDE desktop links no longer work

mrmuckle · 11-28-2006, 02:22 AM

Dual boot XP and SUSE 9.3. XP had 2 partitions - one C:\ and one D:\, both on hda1. I resized D:\ to use 30GB for a new Linux partition, using Yast2 partitioning. It asked what type (/usr, /home, etc.) and I chose "/home". Now the KDE desktop icons/links don't work. I am now in root, which still works. I haven't re-booted since the resizing/partitioning for fear of being locked out of Linux totally. The new /home is located on hda6, where it used to be hdb3. Should I bite the bullet and reboot? Or is there something else I should do first??? I have been searching the forums for the last 2 hours, to no avail. Obviously, the 1st mistake I made was thinking I knew what I was doing. Please HELP! Thank you!

David the H. · 11-28-2006, 03:06 AM

Well, first of all, just to be clear, are you trying to move your home directory to the new hda6 /home, or was that just a mistake and you actually want to keep /home on hdb3?

I'm guessing here, but it sounds to me like Yast automatically unmounted your old /home directory and mounted the new one in its place. Since you didn't shut down X, the desktop remained in memory, but your home files have all became inaccessable because they're still on the old disk. Am I right? Do you even have a user directory in /home anymore?

So, if you want everything to be in the new /home directory, you probably just have to mount /hdb3 to a different location and copy your old home user's directory into to the new /home partition. Then log-in again, or restart your whole system if you want to play it safe.

If you don't want to use the new /home directory, you'll have to edit /etc/fstab so that /home points back to the original directory again. A simple change in the line from /hda6 to /hdb3 should be all that's needed. Then just save and remount /home.

And I wouldn't be too worried about losing all access. As long as the main / and /usr folders are still available I think you should still be able to access it as root. You might not be able to start X though. But you should always have a working Linux live CD on hand for rescue purposes in any case.

mrmuckle · 11-28-2006, 12:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by David the H.

Well, first of all, just to be clear, are you trying to move your home directory to the new hda6 /home, or was that just a mistake and you actually want to keep /home on hdb3?

>>I was going to move the /home to the new hda6 location, but I didn't realize Yast2 would do it for me automatically, losing everything in the /home folder in the process!!!!!!!!!

I'm guessing here, but it sounds to me like Yast automatically unmounted your old /home directory and mounted the new one in its place. Since you didn't shut down X, the desktop remained in memory, but your home files have all became inaccessable because they're still on the old disk. Am I right? Do you even have a user directory in /home anymore?

>>You're right - I DON'T have a /user dir in /home anymore. And I can't seem to find the new /home when I do a search for it...

So, if you want everything to be in the new /home directory, you probably just have to mount /hdb3 to a different location and copy your old home user's directory into to the new /home partition. Then log-in again, or restart your whole system if you want to play it safe.

>>I'm not sure how to "mount the /hdb3 to a different location", and I can't even find the old /user directory...

If you don't want to use the new /home directory, you'll have to edit /etc/fstab so that /home points back to the original directory again. A simple change in the line from /hda6 to /hdb3 should be all that's needed. Then just save and remount /home.

And I wouldn't be too worried about losing all access. As long as the main / and /usr folders are still available I think you should still be able to access it as root. You might not be able to start X though. But you should always have a working Linux live CD on hand for rescue purposes in any case.

>>Thank you - and ANYONE ELSE who will try to help me out of this hole I've dug myself into!

jschiwal · 11-28-2006, 01:08 PM

First, you may have simply mounted over your /home directory. If you unmount your new partition, the contents of your old home may be revealed. If not, you nay need to do some hunting around.

Boot up in the rescue mode and use fdisk -l to list all of your partitions. Mount them one at a time under /mnt and locate the partition that has your home directory in it. Then mount your regular root partition and edit your /etc/fstab file so that partition you found is mounted as /home, and your new partition is mounted as home-new.

Now you can oopy the contents of /home to /home-new. This is one time where you probably want to log in as root, since root's home directory isn't in the /home partition, and you can move its contents without causing problems on a running system. Finally you can re-edit /etc/fstab so that your new partition is mounted as home.

mrmuckle · 11-28-2006, 02:24 PM

THANK YOU to both of you. I got it back (fixed) and all is well.
Muchas gracias!!!!!!