Ubuntu Installation :: Home Directory Moved After Reinstall
Mar 5, 2010
I have been out of the Linux loop for a while. Prior to the holidays I did something 'stupid' within Wine and ended up taking out my Ubuntu partition to the point where it wouldn't boot. Being that I have a triple boot system and I had plans for the holidays, I didn't want to risk a reinstall in the event that if something went wrong with Grub, it would render my whole system useless. So I waited until now to reinstall Ubuntu. I performed the reinstall this past weekend and for the most part I thought everything went fine, but I noticed something was different with the file system.
When I attempted to load a 3.5gig program into Ubuntu yesterday, I got an error message saying that I don't have enough disk space. I said to my self, "That is impossible as I have a 106gig partition for programs". I have a separated system in which Ubuntu /root has an 8gig partition and the Home partition supposed to be the 106gig drive. I did this in the event I had to reinstall, I wouldn't loose my information. Well apparently something went wrong with the install and it appears that I have two Home folders...one is on the 106gig drive and the other is in the root directory.
Making note of that explained why my program wouldn't load because the root partition is only 8gig. So, my question is this: Can I set Ubuntu back to the old Home directory, or do I have to reinstall once again? As what under my avatar says, I am on Ubuntu Studio 8.04 (Hardy Heron). I stuck with this older version because it has long term support. I have a triple boot system with Windows XP, Puppy Linux, and Ubuntu Studio. I have two SATA 500gig drives with the first drive being home to all the operating systems and programs. The second drive is just for data.
Here is my fdisk -l I put the partitions usage in parenthesis:
geo@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000cf364 .....
I've made a LAMP install and used it as a test server connected to my Mac. Good. I managed to get Dreamweaver to work with the server and had access to the home folder from my Mac. The bad part is when I was setting up the permissions for my Mac to connect, I gave it too many rights and set /etc/exports with "no_root_squash" option. This allowed me to change permissions in my home folder from the Mac! That was really cool. The trouble started when I tried to get too clever about managing my F11 test server.
The permission change on the F11 box from the Mac created a new user 501. All the home files had this new user, 501, and a new group 501. I manually edited the /etc/passwd file giving this new PID a meaningful name, rXtian, and set its group to Xtian from the original user. Just to make myself feel really clever, I read in my "F11 Bible" that a "portable desktop" would make it easier to manage log in from different machines. I created a new home directory and CP'n the content from:
/home/Xtian to /home/xtiansimonsibm/Xtian (with -rw-r--r-- rXtian Xtian)
What I mean to say is I deleted the old /home/Xtian directory for reasons I do not know. Thats when all the trouble started. I can't login to either user, rXtian or Xtian. I can only get on as root. I tried to start over by creating a third user with ADDUSER including the base set of user files. I renamed home/xtiansimonsibm/rXtian. I can't log in to either. I used PASSWD command changing Xtian and rXtian's loginpass, but neither password has taken. I still have the test server working, but I can't login to the home folder anymore. What can I do? Any tutorial or checklist for repairinig the user permissions, passwords?
I'm having trouble since I installed the newest kernel update. I only have one desktop. I unistalled compiz. Then I get the message 'you don't appear to have a window manager installed' I reinstalled compiz, but it gives me a misty screen, with the cube desktop. How do I set compiz to a default setting? Plain and simple? Where is the config file? This may have started when I clicked a box 'enable indirect rendering' just to see what happened. I have an nvidia 9200 card on an Asus laptop.Failing that, how do I reinstall Fed 12 without wiping out my home directory?
I recently reinstalled Lenny and I am attempting to save my /home directory. I used the graphical install and when it came to the part about partitioning, I created a new /home partition "hdb1" and told the installer to ignore my old /home partition "/dev/hda9".Following the completion of the install, I logged in and changed my /etc/fstab so that /home --> my old /home partition "/dev/hda9". I then mounted the old partition to /home and rebooted the system. Now, when I go to my /home directory >> properties, I can see that the files I had are on the drive (2GB are used) --- but --- I cannot actually see the files??
So I've finally given up on saving my kubuntu install that wont boot. I've searched, and looked, but couldn't find a thing.My delema now is to make sure that I:
a) get all of the user data safely packed up onto my external USB drive. I believe it's all in the home directory. I'm not sure about getting hidden files though...
b) get the new install to go smoothly, and not mess up grub or the parralell XP install on the same hard drive.
c) get the user data back on the computer and recreate the user structure. Permissions were messed up already, so setting those up again is not an issue.
So, I've been poking around, and this is how I think things should go:
a) tar cvpjf backup.tar.bz2 /home to get my home directory backed up. Not exactly sure how to get from here to my external hd, but I'm sure I can figure it out
b) just run a live cd of kubuntu, delete the old partitions, and reinstall over them?
c) unzip the tar into by /home directory.
That's all I've been able to find so far. How do I set up the users? Will they show up as soon as I untar? Will the resinstall play nice with my windows install? Will I get all the hidden files too? Is there anything I'm missing?
I installed Mythbuntu, got some Wine apps up and running, then discovered my Nvidia DualTV MCE won't work with Myth. So I'd like to try a different variant, either the plain vanilla Ubuntu or UbuntuStudio.Can I just use Mythbuntu to create a new partition, move /home/* to it, and then reformat and install over the original Mythbuntu partition? When I reinstall the new version, how do I tell the installation process to use /home on the other partition (without overwriting it) instead of creating a new one from scratch?
I'm wiping out / on an Ubuntu box but want to keep everything in /home/, which is mounted on a different partition. Using Code: ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase ~/.ecryptfs/wrapped-passphrase I have unwrapped the passphrase, resulting in a ~25 character alphanumeric string. Is it possible for me to install from a disk and give the installer the (current) passphrase so that it will automatically mount my home directory?
How do I ensure that my home partition does not get deleted the next time I reinstall Ubuntu, as I can see there is a choice between formatting the whole drive and manually partition it, but if I reinstall won't I delete the home partition as well?
I tried to install rawhide by enabling the rawhide repo and doing a yum update. Lets just say it didn't go so well. My system wont start the GUI when I start the computer. It just shows the Fedora boot animation and stays there. So anyway I need to reinstall Fedora 14. I wanted to reinstall Fedora without having to backup and restore all my data (my home directory). So I did some Googleing and found that if I had my home directory on a separate partition that I was set to go. All I had to do was format "/" and just tell it to use the "/home" partition I already had and not to format it and I that was it. So I went to try it myself and found that it was not as straight forward as it seemed. Well at least for me.
I clicked on "lv_root" assuming that was supposed to have "/" as its mount point. I clicked the edit button. I selected "/" as its mount point and told it to format it as ext4. Then I clicked on lv_home and clicked on the edit button. I made its mount point "/home" and clicked "ok". I clicked "Next" and I get this error "Bootable partitions cannot be on a logical volume". What do I need to do to fix this? I assume this has to do with the "lv_" at the beginning of the partition names.
I will be version-upgrading a friends (Ubuntu only) laptop very soon. It is 9.04 now and the new version will be (ideally) 10.04.1 The machine has a large unused area on the hard drive and who has known this situation was to use the uncommitted area to do a complete new install of 10.04.1, leaving the 9.04 unchanged (useful insurance). Then, copy, paste (?) the /home directory from the 9.04 into the newly completed installed 10.04.1 overwriting the installed directory.
Opinions seem to support the notion that such a paste into 10.04.1 is likely to be successful and trouble free as long as the 10.04.1 installing username is the same as the 9.04 username with same privilege level. I would be grateful for comments here, particularly with any details, gotchas, you can see.
ubuntu 10.04 Easy Peasy eeepc 900I have messed up my home directory and can not get out of the messI wanted to move the /home to be on the 16gb partition instead of the default which was on the 4gb with the installation. I copied/saved /home to a temporary directory and then moved the contents of /home to the 16gb disk and mounted it on /home At this stage all seemed to be working correctly and applications worked as before. However when I rebooted it can not find my home directory, complains a lot, and if you bypass the messages ends up with a minimal GUI screen which does not respond to anything I tried. It seems that the 16gb disk is not being mounted.
I have an interdependent collection of scripts in my ~/bin directory as well as a developed ~/.vim directory and some other libraries and such in other subdirectories. I've been versioning all of this using git, and have realized that it would be potentially very easy and useful to do development and testing of new and existing scripts, vim plugins, etc. using a cloned repo, and then pull the working code into my actual home directory with a merge.
The easiest way to do this would seem to be to just change & export $HOME, eg
cd ~/testing; git clone ~ home export HOME=~/testing/home cd ~ screen -S testing-home # start vim, write/revise plugins, edit scripts, etc. # test revisions
However since I've never tried this before I'm concerned that some programs, environment variables, etc., may end up using my actual home directory instead of the exported one. Is this a viable strategy? Are there just a few outliers that I should be careful about?
I was dual booting Ubuntu and Windows, had to reinstall Windows, it wiped out grub, need to reinstall it now. Was following this: [URL]
Trying to reinstall grub with: Code: sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/d566e91e-941f-4433-8dea-05d3bffb5669 /dev/sda6 Gives me the following error: Code: /usr/sbin/grub-setup: warn: Attempting to install GRUB to a partition instead of the MBR. This is a BAD idea.. /usr/sbin/grub-setup: warn: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are unreliable and their use is discouraged.. /usr/sbin/grub-setup: error: if you really want blocklists, use --force. *edit more info* Ubuntu is installed on /dev/sda6 on a 50GB partition.
Code: Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 26 56830 456280064 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 * 56830 56843 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 56843 70981 113561600 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda4 70981 77826 54979585 5 Extended /dev/sda5 77096 77826 5859328 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda6 70981 77096 49120256 83 Linux
Partition table entries are not in disk order So, I didn't want to do anything and screw things up. I want to boot with grub and not MBR. What should I do?
Ok. I have a media server running debian amd64. when I installed it I made separate partitions for root (/) home (/home) var (/var) and swap.
I'm adding some new hardware (mobo and ram) and want to reinstall debian. I would like to keep my home and var partitions intact and just reinstall everything in root (/) partition.
I'm unsure of how to do this during the installation. Do i need to format? how do I tell it to use the /var and /home partitions?
I was trying to install a program and then I tried to mv comman (which I probably did wrong) but to make it short I am pretty sure I deleted the directory. I made another Downloads directory using mkdir but whenever I download anything now I have no idea where it goes.
How to set the default file permissions on ALL newly created files in linux - but differs in important ways:
I want all files created in (or copied to or moved to) a certain directory to inherit a set of default permissions that is different from the system default.
Rationale: The directory in question is the "intake hopper" for an application. Users in a group place files in the directory, and the app (running under another user id in the same group) takes them and processes them. The problem is that the owner of each file placed in the directory is the user that placed it there, and the permissions are defaulting to "rw-r--r--"; I want to change that to "rw-rw----". The app doing the intake can't do that explicitly, because the user id the app is running under doesn't own the file in question, and the default permissions don't allow the app to chmod on the file! Obviously, the user could do a chmod after putting the file there - but I want to keep the "drop" by the user as simple as possible. (These folks are not linux-literate, they just drag and drop the files from their windows desktop to a (Samba) network share - i.e. they don't even know they are interacting with a linux system.)
umask seems too powerful: I don't want to set default permissions for every file created anywhere by these users - just those created in (or placed in) this directory.
I have successfully migrated my linux install to a new /, /home, /boot partition on my ssd. Everything works fine, except that it won't make the root directory on the right disk. When I change the root=uuid=<drive id> to my new drive everything is fine, but I can't automate that... in other words I have manually typed the uuid of my root-partition for about 100 times now and I am fed up with that how I can save the uuid of my new drive in the startup parameters?
Is it possible to split the home directory into 2, 1 for the personal files (documents, images, videos, music, etc.) and another for the setting files (config, temp, etc.)
What is the minimal size for a home directory?I did a manual partition install in VirtualBox. My vdi had these settings: RAM = 500MB & HDD = 10GB.Does this look correct.I am never certain as to the options for Primary, Logic, Beginning and End.Does it matter the order in which you make partitions in Ubuntu?
I tried upgrading to 10.04, and now when it boots it just goes into a grub2 terminal and doesn't display a boot menu. I tried re-installing grub2 from the live cd, but that didn't do anything. I figured if I've hosed the last install I'll install from scratch, but I can't even access my files from the live cd! I did a bit of searching and everyone seems to just encrypt ~/Private, whereas I've encrypted the whole home directory. So much for security... In the live cd, it has a readme.txt and says to type "ecryptfs-mount-private" to access the files, but it just gives the error "ERROR: Encrypted private directory is not setup properly". What do I do?
I did a fresh Maverick install with custom partition layout and didn't select "encrypt home parition" as my home partition was being saved from previous installation.Now, is there a guide I could follow to encrypt my home partition the same way Maverick would do? I just want to avoid screwing my system in the next upgrade if encrypting methods differ.
I installed a new 11.04 on my Thinkpad in place of the old 10.10 system, so it replaced the old /home with a new empty one. But I had previously done a partition copy of the original 10.10, complete with /home to a spare HDD so now I can copy that /home in place of the new empty /home. What's the best way to do that? Should I use 'dd'? Should I use Nautilus? Or should I partition-copy that copy of the 10.10 onto available space on the thinkpad 11.04, then manipulate the partitions to consolidate? Maybe create a separate /home partition?
I'm trying to relocate my home directory which currently resides at the default, root location /home/user.
My Systems Specs: Karmic64 Root resides on a Raid0 LVM MD0 NEW Drive resides on Raid0 LVM MD1
I installed a new disk on a LVM(Logical Volume Manager), and now want to move my default home directory to the new location. I did rsync my home directory from the OLD to the NEW. When I do update my /etc/fstab with the NEW home location, I recieve errors upon rebooting, that certainly relate to permission issues, including some from Nautilus that mentions permissions issues...
I also tried to update the USERS/GROUP Manager with the NEW location but after reopening the USERS/GROUP manager, I can see the original location has been reverted back. I can create a new user and succesfully map their home directory to the NEW home location on my MD1 LVM. Any links on home to remap their existing HOME directory to a new location?
I had errors pop up when I tried updating my 10.10 to 11.04 so I ended up having to do it from a Live USB which installs it over everything (fine by me).Unfortunately I forgot I had an encrypted /home directory. So various messages and stuff came up when I tried to log in.nfortunately I don't remember what my encryption passphrase is offhand, so I moved it to a slightly different folder name and had to have a new directory created for my username.It's still there, but how can I try to open it trying the various versions of the passphrase I think it may be? Can I double-click it and try?Also, in the future what is the best way to handle a "fresh" install that I want to connect to my encrypted /home directory?
I have a dual-boot macbook with an OS X partition and an ubuntu partition. When I first installed ubuntu, I changed my home folder to my OS X home directory to synchronize all my files from both. My home directory is now /media/sda2/Users/username/. In a regular home folder, the icons for Documents, Music, Pictures, Movies, etc. are different (not just with emblems, but actually different icons). But when I changed my home folder, these subfolders' icons stayed the same as regular folder icons and I can't figure out a way to change that default setting. I know how to change the icons for each folder manually, but these changes don't appear everywhere (i.e. nautilus, places, etc). Furthermore, every time I change my icon theme, I would have to manually reassign icons for these folders. Is there a way to globally change the folder icons for these folders?
I recently bought a new hard disk for my /home tree. I don't have encrypted home directories currently, but I was wondering if there is an easy way to encrypt my home directory so that it is automatically decrypted when I'm logging in (console/kdm). Basically I would like to manually do same thing as Debian installer would have done.
I need to specify a different path to home directories on a particular server than what LDAP contains for the users, besides using a symlink. E.g. "/Users/jdoe" vs "/home/jdoe" I don't want to change the actual LDAP attributes, just want a particular server to point them in the right direction (Ubuntu 10.04).
I'm assuming it's something I could probably set in pam configurations?
So I was messing around trying to uninstall Nibbles and reinstall since I have an issue starting that game and something happened and removed the submenu under Games called "Logic", which had another whole list of games.
Is it possible to reinstall the games package or reinstall the update?I'm thinking more of the lines of a system restore or something so back 2 days from today.
