Moving Home directory back to Root partition

[grxgghxrpxr]

Hello.

I'm trying to move my Home directory back to my Root partition.
I'm mostly having success.

What I've done is:
sudo mkdir /mnt/tmp
‘sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/tmp’ (Root)
‘sudo mkdir /mnt/home’.
‘sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/home’
‘sudo cp -rp /mnt/home/* /mnt/tmp/’ OR ‘sudo cp -rp /mnt/home/* /mnt/tmp/home/’

When I copy to just /mnt/tmp, it moves all my files to the Root directory, but when I copy to /mnt/tmp/home, it creates another folder in Home called Home, meaning it doesn't work either way. How can I do this successfully?

Thanks
Gregg

[AndyMH]

Boot a live session (your mint install media) and copy everything from your existing /home partition to the /home folder on your existing / partition. Then edit fstab to remove the entry pointing at your home partition.

Why are you doing this, seems a retrograde step to me?

Take a backup before you start.

[grxgghxrpxr]

Boot a live session (your mint install media) and copy everything from your existing /home partition to the /home folder on your existing / partition. Then edit fstab to remove the entry pointing at your home partition.

Why are you doing this, seems a retrograde step to me?

Take a backup before you start.

Thank you for this. What would be the best way of copying in terms of what command should I enter?

This might sound strange, but I'm just experimenting in a virtual machine to find out how to do this.

[Flemur]

Thank you for this. What would be the best way of copying in terms of what command should I enter?

Running from the live USB:

Code: Select all

cp -ax /whatever/username /home/.

/whatever/username = where your $HOME (=/home/username) is located on the not-OS partition
/home/. = the location on the OS partition which will become /home when you boot.

-ax = copy and preserve ownership, etc, and copy links as links.

If you copy from /whatever/username/*, you'll miss the "." files; the easy way is to copy the entire username directory.

[grxgghxrpxr]

Thank you so much! This worked, I was able to do this using a TTY prompt, rather than bootable media.

[Termy]

I guess the takeaway here is that if an alternative '/home' location is not provided, it defaults to '/home/your_username', if available; I actually didn't know that, as I've never done it that way around before. I've done the same as you, but the other way around, and on hardware. It's pretty smooth sailing, really. I love that Linux gives you the option to do all these cool things; it's so flexible!