Cannot enter home directory using /.

openSUSE 12.3
KDE 4.10.5

I am not surprised that this is where I am as it seems common when ever someone tries to move /home.

Which is what I did.
I only have one user and a new sda and sdb. No Windows, only opensuse, should be easy huh ?

My plan was to have /home located on sdb1. My 2 mount points are

/sdb/sdb1 home
sdb/sdb2 other stuff

I created a link in / as “ln -s /sdb/sdb1/home” thinking that this would take the place of the “/home” that gets created at install.

Opensuse is installed on sda and I am trying to move /home to sdb1.
I think I got it moved ok, but I can’t log in.
So here is how it looks and I have been trying all morning to get it to work, with no luck.
It is most likely that I have a permission or 2 wrong somewhere.
Where did I go wrong ?

Corky-PC:/sdb/sdb1/home/hexdump # df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        1.8G  8.0K  1.8G   1% /dev
tmpfs           1.9G   84K  1.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           1.9G  3.4M  1.9G   1% /run
/dev/sda2       194G   12G  173G   7% /
tmpfs           1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           1.9G  3.4M  1.9G   1% /var/lock
tmpfs           1.9G  3.4M  1.9G   1% /var/run
/dev/sdb2        20G  172M   19G   1% /sdb/sdb2
/dev/sdb1       725G   10G  678G   2% /sdb/sdb1/home
Corky-PC:/sdb/sdb1/home/hexdump # 
Corky-PC:/sdb/sdb1/home/hexdump # 
Corky-PC:/sdb/sdb1/home/hexdump # cat /etc/fstab
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SanDisk_SDSSDHP256G_133357400917-part1 swap                 swap       defaults              0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SanDisk_SDSSDHP256G_133357400917-part2 /                    ext4       acl,user_xattr,noatime,discard        1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD10EZEX-60ZF5A0_WD-WCC1S4017707-part1 /sdb/sdb1/home                ext4       defaults        0 0
###   /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD10EZEX-60ZF5A0_WD-WCC1S4017707-part1   /sdb/sdb1 ext4       defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD10EZEX-60ZF5A0_WD-WCC1S4017707-part2   /sdb/sdb2 ext4       defaults 0 0

proc                 /proc                proc       defaults              0 0
sysfs                /sys                 sysfs      noauto                0 0
debugfs              /sys/kernel/debug    debugfs    noauto                0 0
usbfs                /proc/bus/usb        usbfs      noauto                0 0
devpts               /dev/pts             devpts     mode=0620,gid=5       0 0

Corky-PC:/sdb/sdb1/home/hexdump # 
Corky-PC:/sdb/sdb1/home/hexdump # 

Not how to do it. You are making it too hard rotfl!

create a directory wherever you want that extra stuff to live then use that as the mount point. It can be any where you want just avoid existing names

You can’t link to something that has not been mounted

If you want the sdb1 partition to be home just don’t mount the old one and mount sdb1 as /home. If you want the stuff or space from the old partition pick a place create a directory and mount it there the the stuff will show up in that directory.

I think you are some how wanting to merge 2 existing partitions as one you can’t do that you can mount them anywhere but each is its own branch. You can mount moe then one partition to the same mount point but the last one mounted is the only one you will see so it does not make sense to do that.

Note that if you set up partitions as LVM you can chain them together across drives or even systems so they look like one larger partition. But you have to set that up when you start out. You can’t just simply make an existing partition LVM . At least not without backing everything creating the LVM container and restoring the data

The extra stuff is users home directories, and they were already in /home. I was trying to move their data from sda3 to sdb1

I get confused about wwwhat I can see, when talking about the “home” directory.

Please set me straight.

If you look into /home on a multi-user system, what do you see ? Will a user only see his stuff ?

Ok, I modified fstab as you suggested so that it now looks like this about sdb1, and I typically make things too darn hard.

**/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD10EZEX-60ZF5A0_WD-WCC1S4017707-part1 /home ext4 defaults 0 0

**[size=2]I tried rebooting with my user and I got part way. A black screen with the hard -disk icon in the middle, then it stopped.
I can get out to a command propmt but don’t know what to do from there.
I can log in with root no problem.
[/size]

After the stop and after poking a few ALT-F windows, I am closer.

The messages say: KDE unable to start. No write access to $HOME. /home/hexdump
that is one of them. the other is

/home/hexdump/.kde4/share/config/knotifyrc not writable.

Now, how to fix it.

I think I figured it out and am going to go figure out how to do what I want.

I think if I change the ownership of everything under the user “hexdump” it might work.

I created a brand new user to see how it was set up as to permissions and it’s different.
One thing that I was happy to see was that the new user haad his home located on the empty disk as I had intended. YIPPEE !!

So, what command will do this and do it to all files and sub-directories ?

chown and something else no doubt.

YES !!!

chown hexdump:users -R directoryname

That was it ! The -R was a miracle worker.

And I am proud of myself. I dug myself a 12 foot hole and then got out.
Of course the help here had a lot to do with it. lol!

Thanks folks.

LOL grats rotfl!

It would have been far easier to temp mount the new partition somewhere (other then /home) then copy the old home stuff over to the new partition, cp with a -R parameter would do that, and then remove the old home from the fstab and add the new one as /home.

Any partition does not know where it goes it is just a tree branch waiting to get grafted to a mount point. So your home partition does not know it is /home until you mount it as such. The partition just contains files and directories that you would see if you go into the point at which you mount it so your home partition does not have a /home it just has the files that you normally see in /home. /home is the mount point.