Making documents and settings a seperate partition from the OS itself

[Shadow Skill]

I was reading a zdnet article and one of the posters mentioned how he sets up windows machines so that Documents and Settings (home) is actually a seperate partion from the portion that boots..eseentially "/" is now seperate entirely from home so that in the event that "/" suffers from what I like to call DOOM you can reinstall the os itself to "/" and then point the PATH variables to the other partitions that contain your home directory etc. What I want to know is do any of you have any idea what I have to edit in the registry to accomplish this? I am going to need detailed explanations if any of you have done this with your windows OS..

Note this next part partains to Fedora but I didn't want to risk duplicating a thread in another part of the board.

How exactly would I do the above with Fedora (specifically fc2) and is it true that Mandrake (I use mandrake 10 on my laptop) makes /home a seperate partition by default?

[foolish]

We don't answer windows questions. FEDORAforum, remember?

As for the Fedora vs. Mandrake question, both are capable of making a seperate partition for /home/ during installation, I don't know about mandrake (again, Feddoraforum), but during the installation of Fedora Core you can do manual partitioning using diskdruid (it's not hard at all) and make a seperate /home/ partition. If you want to use other file systems, see www.fedorafaq.org.

disregard foolish's comment about windows.
if we know the answer, we are more than elaated to help you, but I don't think anyone here know how to do that. it would be nice if you could, because then you could have windows and linux share the same home directory.
there is an advanced feature in windows that lets you specify each users home directory, but I haven't used it. I believe its under the
1) control panel -> performance (in xp) -> administrative tools -> comperture management -> local users
2) right click, click prooperties and click the profile tab
3) there I think you can set the home folder path and specify which drive
that might do the trick.

[Shadow Skill]

I hope the guy who first mentioned this sees my reply, I'd like to know how to better setup my windows system by the time the next reformat comes around. (Seems like windows just needs one after a while...)

actually your right. it is advisable to backup your data and reformat your harddrive and reinstall windows anually. windows sadly suffers from "bit rot" usually from a messy registry. every time you install and uninstall a program the system takes a hit to the registry. then again, most people don't run mission critical things on windows machines, simply because it still has to restart when installing certain drivers or after appling patches.
but I'm with you: we need to find a new way to setup windows from the begining. whats funny is that I've been on linux for about two year while I've been on windows for about eight, yet I know more about linux than a windows gui could ever dream of teaching me about windows.

[Shadow Skill]

Scary isn't it

[Shadow Skill]

I managed to find some instructions on how to actually do this, but I have not had a chance to test it out. I should have some free time this weekend, I'll be sure to do it and let you all know if it is successful before I post the instructions.

at least post a limk to the instruction so we all can test.

[David59]

Originally Posted by Shadow Skill

I was reading a zdnet article and one of the posters mentioned how he sets up windows machines so that Documents and Settings (home) is actually a seperate partion from the portion that boots..eseentially "/" is now seperate entirely from home so that in the event that "/" suffers from what I like to call DOOM you can reinstall the os itself to "/" and then point the PATH variables to the other partitions that contain your home directory etc. What I want to know is do any of you have any idea what I have to edit in the registry to accomplish this? I am going to need detailed explanations if any of you have done this with your windows OS..


How exactly would I do the above with Fedora (specifically fc2) and is it true that Mandrake (I use mandrake 10 on my laptop) makes /home a seperate partition by default?

You can do that in linux. Separating /home from the whole system while make your upgrades ou reformats easier. You'll only need to reformat / and you will keep your documents. All you'll have to do is to create the users with the correct UID to match your original system.

Now back to windows. Permissions relies on the SAM, don't they ?
What if you reinstall your system, how could you ensure that you'll have the rights to read/write/execute programs in Documents & Settings ?????


PS : hmmm.... sorry for my poor english, I'm french !

[Shadow Skill]

Hehehe I didnt want to be responsible if any of you blew up your windows partition.... Note that this is taken from annoyances.org, I don't have a url handy so I'll just attach the contents of the reply:

you could have at least used an open format, but thanks.

[Shadow Skill]

Well I was under windows when I found it..besides OO can open those just fine as long as you don't password protect the files.... (That really needs to change, as I have some sensitive files I would like to be able to modify under Fedora without removing the password.) Plus Office 2003 actually doesn't suck although it could really use tabs instead of opening a seperate window over and over...

[Techtoucian]

That looks like a really messy way to do it. :-/ I had the idea that somehow you could just mount another disk in the directory "Documents and Settings" under your primary disk, after copying everything over... But yeah, that's as far as I got. Somehow I don't think it would let you do it. :-P

[Shadow Skill]

Yes messy but effective...