Copy Over/make A New /home Partition

Let's say you have a new HDD; the one you installed on is about to fail; or you screwed up the installed version (as I did), there may come a time when you want to make a duplicate of your /home partition -- retaining all the file & system attributes.
In my case, I tried Portable Suse & did a Sled kernel update & it's all acting rather strange.

Here's how:

Reference:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list...r/msg00774.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linu...l-partplan.html

Let's say I have my running 10.3 install with root "/" on /dev/sda1 and /home on /dev/sda2 to start.

With a new drive (sic) & using Parted Magic, I created & formatted (with ext3) /dev/sdb1 for "/" & /dev/sdb2 for my new /home <--(is where I want to put my 10.3 running /home). The partition sizes were the same as
the original partitions.

In my running 10.3, I created a working directory "test" in /mnt
in a terminal as root

mkdir /mnt/test

in the next step, we are going to mount /dev/sdb2 there so 10.3 can see it and do it in a reboot to runlevel 1.

So now, we want to reboot the running 10.3 into runlevel "1" which is command line & copy over the "contents" of the running /home (not /home itself).

boot your 10.3 install & at the bootsplash, type "1" <--boots 10.3 to runlevel 1 <--We don't want anything like a daemon to mess this up.

login as root

type:

mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/test

then to be safe

cd /home

Now copy over 10.3's /home to /mnt/test (which is our /dev/sdb2)

cp -ax /home/* /mnt/test

In a terminal, do "man cp" to see what "-a" & "-x" do for you.

wait until it's done which may take awhile


unmount /mnt/test

umount /mnt/test

"reboot"

Now you should be able to install 10.3 to /dev/sdb1 (don't format /dev/sdb2) and have a working copy of your old /home partition.
Edit: During the install, use the custom partitioner & assign /dev/sdb2 the mount point "/home". One of the last config windows will ask if this is to be the /home to be utilized; answer "yes".

You may have to rename /dev/sdb1 & /dev/sdb2 to match your own partition scheme; but, the scheme should work.

Worked for me
Many things like Kmail, with all my mail intact , work as before out of the box;
a few apps like Virtualbox need to be installed, but, once installed, I still have my winxp setup;
fewer desktop apps like Gantt Project had to have the link-to-application redone.

Have fun...

Definitely useful, perhaps be a little more detailed in your explanation. Please do so, actually, because I have a feeling I'm going to need to do this in the future.
(You explain everything but not thoroughly enough for my tastes)