/home locations after upgrade

[denzil]

I have looked, but can't find an answer that quite fits. I have been running LM9, with my /home on a separate partition. I have just installed LM11 as a dual boot, so I could still use LM9 if there were any issues. The LM11 installation is using its own newly-created /home in its own partition. How do I tell it to use the original /home partition instead?

[xenopeek]

Is the /home for Linux Mint 11 on a separate partition, or included in the / partition? (If you don't know, please share the output of: cat /etc/fstab)

[denzil]

LM11 has created its /home in its own partition. So at the moment I have LM9 on sda1, LM9 swap on sda2, /home on sda3, and lm11 on sda4

Just to make the point, I know there are potential problems allowing two distributions to share a /home, but that isn't what I want to do. As soon as I'm sure LM11 is working OK I'll delete LM9.

[jimzhong]

Just boot into recovery mode, copy your home folder to the new location and then modify /etc/fstab
You should avoid using the same name in both systems. This is what I do.
And also, do not hibernate one system and then boot into another, which may destroy your data.

[denzil]

I don't want to move the new /home, I want it to use the old one that is already there. If I just edit etc/fstab to change the UUID to that of the existing /home on sda3, will that work? There are no documents in the new /home, so do I need to copy any system files from the new /home or will it sort itself out?

[jimzhong]

You need to copy them first and then edit fstab
You can consult this page http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-partplan/index.html

[denzil]

Copy what? I have only just installed LM11, so there are no documents in the new /home. All I want to do is tell it to use the old /home, because that is where all my files are. My question still stands, can I just edit etc/fstab, or will I have to copy any system files from the new /home. If so, which ones, exactly?

[xenopeek]

there are no documents in the new /home

Sorry for that To explain better, there are hidden configuration files and folders in your home folder. These contain the preferences and settings for your applications, as configured for your user. To see them, open a file browser and press Ctrl+H or from the terminal run "ls -a". Because of application versions between LM9 and LM11 differ, you need to have the LM11 hidden files and not the LM9 hidden files (this will mess things up).

I'm not sure of the steps jimzhong shares, they seem complete, as long as the ID of your user on LM9 is the same as on LM11 and you don't have an encrypted home folder on either!

Then possibly it will work if you remove all the hidden folders and files from the LM9 /home, and then proceed with jimzhong's steps and move all the hidden folders and files from LM11 over to the LM9 /home.

[denzil]

I know about the hidden files. Sorry if I wasn't clear but that is what I meant by ""system files". I have only booted LM11 once, and have not created anything using it. That is what I meant by not having any documents.

So, I shall do this, unless anyone tells me otherwise!

1. Back up all my documents, Thunderbird and Firefox profiles etc.
2. Copy the new LM11 /home (including hidden files) into the old partition on sda3
3. Move stuff from the backup into the newly copied /home. I can sort out the TB and FF profiles.