Moving (or renaming) /home folder.

[oltraver]

I am a relatively fresh Linux user and have having trouble figuring out how to accomplish something here.

I am running Fedora Core 4, using a single SATA hard drive. I want to enable quotas on my home directories (only 2 users on box) so that they cannot fill up the system. The 2 users, for the most part, will only be using vsftpd. Vsftpd is installed and configured perfecty, as is apache, a PBPbb message board and MySql.

During initial setup, the Fedora installer put everything (except swap) on one partiton, which I though was OK, as I figured I could resize and move stuff around later. I can't seem to find a way to do this due to having either an upsupported SATA drive or motherboard SATA controller. I've tried command line parted, a bootable SystemRescueCD and Gparted all to no avail. All the latest versions. None of them recognize my primary partition. I also found a tip via Google to try using an older version of Gparted (1.0), and still no luck.

So I then decided I was going to make a virtual filesystem for my home directory, I have that all set up and mounted, with all of my old data copied over to the /newhome directory using cp -pidRv. All is fine and /newhome mounts on bootup with quotas and everything enabled. Now, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to replace my current /home directory with /newhome. Since my system is all on one partiton, all the tutorials I have found discuss using /etc/fstab to change the existing /home to the /newhome after renaming them, and my fstab DOES NOT have an entry for my existing home, and I cannot rename it either.

So, could someone tell me how to go about this, or even if I am just approaching this completley wrong. I REALLY don't want to rebuild the machine just to get the partitions I initially wanted.

Thanks!

-P

[Brian1]

This is the way I would do. If you are not famialiar with vi editor or do not have pico installed. Both are CLI editors. Then you need to boot up with a Live cd like knoppix or ubuntu/kubuntu. Once the live cd is up then mount the partition that has your currrent /home and /etc. Rename home to say home_backup. Now edit /etc/fstab and change the mount point to /home from /newhome. Then rename /newhome to /home if you wish to work off of the contents of /newhome.

If doing under the CLI and your system startsup with a Gui Login Manager then hit Alt-Ctrl-F1. Login as root.
mv /home /home_backup
mv /newhome /home
vi /etc/fstab ( modify moint point for here like above)
save and exit.
mount /home
logout from here.

Alt-Ctrl-F7 returns you to your login manager. Login as a user to check all is well.

The above part is based on what I see from your post. You may need to change if names and locations are incorrect.

Brian1

[oltraver]

That did it, thanks! I knew it had to be easy! I did have to modify the instructions a bit as the /newhome folder was a virtual filesystem, so I did the following instead:

mv /home /home_backup
mkdir -p /home
cp -pidRv /newhome/* /home
umount /newhome
vi /etc/fstab ( modify mount point from /newhome to /home)
save and exit.
mount /home
logout from here.

[Brian1]

Glad to see you have it going. Never messed with virtual filesystems before. What exactly di you use to create one. Might be something I will keep a note on.

Brian1

[oltraver]

I was pretty much following the steps here to create a new /home directory that I could apply quotas to without reformatting my drive:

http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/quota_tutorial.html

Thanks again for the help!

[Brian1]

Thanks for the link. Love learning something new on Linux. Even after 8 years you still find something new whether a modern new way or an old school techinque.

Brian1