[SOLVED] Change /home folder, different file system

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by deretsigernu

Now when I log on, I get an error msg that the .ICEauthority can't be updated and I can't log on at all. I tried to log on as root, but it won't let me. I'm sure of root's passwd, since I just installed FC, but it just won't let me.

That's a bit worrying. root's home directory is /root, and shouldn't be affected by /home. You tried to login in text mode (Ctrl+Alt+F2) right? root cannot login graphically for security reasons.

What happens if you login as yourself in text mode?

I used the livecd to get logged on. Before I logged in with the livecd, I copied .ICEauthority to the new /home (sda6)

.ICEauthority should be in /home/USERNAME not /home, but in any case it should be created on login. Don't try to put it there manually, and if there is one left over from Ubuntu, just delete it. This most likely has to do with permissions as I mentioned before – most likely the login code cannot create the file.

but with the livecd it says that only root has permissions on it. I chroot to the main FC install, but once there, I can't locate sda6, I can only find it when I'm on the liveuser level. At the main FC install level I tried
ls -l /dev
ls -l /media
ls -l /home
The last one only seems to refer to the home that was in place before I tried to change over to /sda6, because it lacks some of the files that would have been in sda6.

This is a little confusing. When you say you copied the file to sda6, you mean the directory where sda6 was mounted, right? If you actually ran something like "cp .ICEauthority /dev/sda6" and it succeeded, then you'll probably have overwritten the start of the filesystem (although "fsck /dev/sda6" should be able to fix it). sda6 refers to the partition and the raw bytes on it; it must be mounted onto a directory to access as a filesystem. /etc/fstab tells the boot scripts what devices to mount where.

How do I navigate to the correct directory and then change the correct permissions and ownership. I was never expert with Linux, but I know there is chmod, chown and whatever, but I don't know those commands well enough. In other words, I only know enough to be dangerous.

mount | grep sda6

will tell you where sda6 is mounted, if it is. If not, run

sudo mount /dev/sda6 /mnt

to mount it on the general mount-point "/mnt".

Then

sudo chown -R YOUR_USER_NAME: MOUNT_POINT/YOUR_USER_NAME

to ensure the permissions are correct. (Don't forget the ":"!)

After that we'll see about getting sda6 mounted on /home.

Gareth

[deretsigernu]

Gareth Jones,
You've been very helpful and I appreciate it tremendously. I thought it would be instructional to try to install my way around, learning about permissions and all that. I just threw in the towel though. I installed FC 15 fresh and as part of the install, set up /sda6 as the /home, so the partition manager just formatted the drive as part of the install. It's now in place as /home and I just copied the files that were backed up over to /home. I feel kind of bad giving up on it, but I was just getting frustrated with something new every time.
Thanks again.

When I had problems logging in as root, I was using the GUI. That explains the problem there.
I did
cp /home/fusca/.ICEauthority /home
so I guess that's one place I messed up.
As far as the mount points, I guess I didn't understand that part as clearly as I thought I did before I started all of this. Like I said, I know just enough to be dangerous. Good thing there are guys like you around to help us ignorant folks out.


I'll mark this thread as solved, but for future reference for anyone else who comes here to read this, I did not solve this issue the way I originally intended.

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by deretsigernu

Gareth Jones,
You've been very helpful and I appreciate it tremendously. I thought it would be instructional to try to install my way around, learning about permissions and all that. I just threw in the towel though. I installed FC 15 fresh and as part of the install, set up /sda6 as the /home, so the partition manager just formatted the drive as part of the install.

Fair enough, at least it's working now!

For reference, I'm pretty sure you can chose to use an existing partition as /home in the installer without having the installer reformat it, but you'd still need to correct the file ownership afterwards (unless the installer is smarter than I think it is).

Gareth

[olig1905]

As a note, if you use the same username that you had on a previous installation you dont have to fix any permissions, well i never have and i have changed distros a fair few times between ubuntu and fedora.

Still Problem solved anyway