Clarification regarding /home folder

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hi,
I’ve installed OpenSuse 11 and partitioned the allocated 10GB space into two partitions (i) 8 GB root partition and (ii) 2 GB /home partition. I,ve another 1 Gb swap partition.
My query is:
on the 2GB /Home partition (/media/sda3/) I’ve a folder by my user name (/media/sda3/arup)
On the 8GB root partition (/media/sda2/) I’ve a home folder and a folder by my user name (/media/sda2/home/arup).
i can see all the torrent files that I’ve downloaded in both /media/sda2/home/arup and /media/sda3/arup.
So, its becoming a bit confused for me. Why this is happening?
Somebody please clarify.

Arup

#2

Firstly. That all sounds strange.
Mostly the fact that /home is so small 2G!!

Make sure the files in the root ver. of your user are not just link files
Have you been running in root?

You need more space for home than 2G, unless you have some other storage you are using

#3

This is a big mess.

please post the output of the commands:

fdisk -l
cat /etc/fstab
#4

fdisk -l gives me:
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x7be67be6

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 18146 145752232+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 18147 19132 7920045 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 19133 19457 2610562+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xb7e61057

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 8448 67858528+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb3 8449 9727 10273567+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 8449 9597 9229311 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 9598 9727 1044193+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

and cat /etc/fstab gives me:
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST380215AS_9QZ7KXQZ-part6 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST3160215A_9RX0KR42-part2 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST3160215A_9RX0KR42-part3 /home ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST3160215A_9RX0KR42-part1 /windows/C vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,utf8=true 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST380215AS_9QZ7KXQZ-part1 /windows/D ntfs-3g users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 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
I use my FAT32 partition for my storage as it can be accesed through both WIN XP and Linux.

#5

archat68 wrote:

>
> Hi,
> I’ve installed OpenSuse 11 and partitioned the allocated 10GB space
> into two partitions (i) 8 GB root partition and (ii) 2 GB /home
> partition. I,ve another 1 Gb swap partition.
> My query is:
> on the 2GB /Home partition (/media/sda3/) I’ve a folder by my user name
> (/media/sda3/arup)
> On the 8GB root partition (/media/sda2/) I’ve a home folder and a
> folder by my user name (/media/sda2/home/arup).
> i can see all the torrent files that I’ve downloaded in both
> /media/sda2/home/arup and /media/sda3/arup.
> So, its becoming a bit confused for me. Why this is happening?
> Somebody please clarify.
>
> _______________
> Arup
>
>
Dear Arup;

I think you are confusing a mounted drive with the actual drive. In the
root file system (/), which lies on sda2, there is a mount point /home that
essentially points to files on another partition, in your case sda3. The
fact that you can find two apparent files arup is just an illusion. In
fact there is only one that resides on sda3, but you can see it through
sda2 by following the mount point.

P. V.

#6

O.K. It may be the answer.:o
Is there a way to confirm it?

Arup

#7

I will try to translate what I see in plain english.

You have two disks:

SATA_ST3160215A_9RX0KR42 known to the system as **sda **and partitioned as follows
sda1 (W95 FAT32 (LBA)) formatted as VFAT and mounted at /windows/D
sda2 (Linux and bootable) formatted as ext3 and mounted at / (root partition)
sda3 (Linux) formatted a ext3 and mounted at /home

SATA_ST380215AS_9QZ7KXQZ known to the system as **sdb **and partitioned as follows
sdb1 (HPFS/NTFS and bootable) formatted as ntfs-rg and mounted at /windows/C
sdb3 (Extended), just contains sdb5 and sdb6 and not usable by the system.
sdb5 (Linux) not used at all!
sdb6 (Linux swap / Solaris) used as swap

(This btw is a bit more complicated then you told us in your original post).

I do not understand what you are seeing at /media. There should be nothing at /media except when you mount there something (often removable media like CDs and DDVDs are mounted there). Post the output of

ls -l /media

so we can see what is there.
Also thoutput of

df

will show us what is mounted where (just to check).

#8

Thanks for the help.
Here you go:

“ls -l /media”
total 0

" df"
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 7797484 4652544 2828140 63% /
udev 900024 128 899896 1% /dev
/dev/sda3 2570032 673620 1844204 27% /home
/dev/sda1 145716608 68894848 76821760 48% /windows/C
/dev/sdb1 67858528 30196033 37662496 45% /windows/D

sdb5 contains my Ubuntu installation which I’m not using right now.

#9

Well, the df shows exactly what I told you and it is also what you want I think.

And there is nothing in /media. The only thing I do not understand now is why you started your post telling us there are all sorts of strange things in /media? What is the misunderstanding here? :confused:

#10

hcvv wrote:

>
> Well, the df shows exactly what I told you and it is also what you want
> I think.
>
> And there is nothing in /media. The only thing I do not understand now
> is why you started your post telling us there are all sorts of strange
> things in /media? What is the misunderstanding here? :confused:
>
>
Archat68;

If you open “My Computer” in KDE the drives are referenced in konqueror with
the prefix: “media:/” . At least this is true on OpenSuse 10.2. ;-). It
would be easy to confuse this with “/media/”.

P. V.

#11

This is true. Unless you actually know what your doing and have given the device a Volume Label in the custom partitioning setup of the installer.

#12

If you open “My Computer” in KDE the drives are referenced in konqueror with
the prefix: “media:/” . At least this is true on OpenSuse 10.2. ;-). It
would be easy to confuse this with “/media/”.

Now I understand that this is my case.:o

Arup

#13

Just consider it part of the learning curve.
Here in Linux you have the ability to customise, not really so with M$.

I have nice Volume Labels for all my partitions
eg: STORE
guess what that’s for!

If you have a windows partition you could have:
WINDOWS XP

If you have a plethora of partitions like me, it’s easier to just see what’s what with Labels.

#14

I am glad we got it! The view from “My Computer” is more or less starting from the hardware side, it shows what is available. Normaly one views it from inside, how is it presented to the end user.

As on a PC you are the end user, but also the systems administrator (and often the hardware engineer), it is easy to mixe up these ‘functions’.