Hi there,
Need some help here please :D, I’m new for this opensuse (previously I came from Ubuntu).
I decided to go for Opensuse because I felt that my previous Ubuntu running very slow on
my laptop machine. And yes, for some reasons, opensuse runs just faster than ubuntu…
well, that’s not the point here. For my installation, I already have separated system partition
which I chose to format for ext4. I leave my /home partition (60GB) to be unformated (ext4) and
the installation went just fine. However, when logged in, for my /home partition, I can’t see
any old data on it. I know that the data is there because the size of the partition is showing 60GB
total, 40GB used and 20GB free. The /home/user directory occupied some new files in there. I
checked the disk size property and it reports that 1GB used from 60GB and the some unreadable
data. So is there any starting point for me to try recover my old data back? I guess I’ve messed up
the /home partition already but still want to try to recovery the data (I have data backup, not recently, but good enough for continuing my work). Any help would be appreciated…
Oh, I see some left over files from my very old /home partition (when I still used Ubuntu, I didn’t initially
set up the /home partition). This mean I haven’t destroyed my old /home partition just yet…??
As you did during install, you should not format (create a file system on) the partition that was mounted on /home earlier, but you should of course fill in the pieces that configure it to be mounted at /home in your new system.
When you forgot that, you now have an empty /home, or if you created a new (same as the old) user during install, it’s data is now in the new /home (which is not a partition at all).
Using YaST > system > Partition Manager, you can still do what you forgot. But again, only provide the mount point for the (correct!) partition and do not format it. YaST will do the mount then and also create an /etc/fstab entry that makes it mounting during every boot.
But, beneath that mounted partition on /home. there is still the data that is put there in the meantime. When you want to know how to remove that, please come back here.
Well, thanks for the advice. I 've decided to put Ubuntu back on to see what happen. And guess what? My home partition is back with all the data and settings. Time to do some more backup before try opensuse again. Still wanna know what going on there.
Cheers…
:D:D:D
Maybe take a look at SDB:Basics of partitions, filesystems, mount points - openSUSE. It is very simple imho. The Ubuntu system still has an entry in /etc/fstab for that partition, while openSUSE doesn’t. Make it (as I told you above) and both will have it mounted.
There is another possibility, that the UID (User ID) for Ubuntu is different from openSuSE. You don’t say which version of OS you’re using but most recent versions have a UID of 1000. You need to check the files created in Ubuntu to see what they were set to. Here is a goog reference to UIDs and GIDs (Group ID):iTWire - UID and GID: the basics of Linux user admin
Also be aware that different distros (and even different versions of any distro) can cause problems since they well may have differences in configuration files due to different program versions or OS branding. :’(
A better way to setup your partitions is to allow /home to install under root (/) directory and have a common data directory containing your documents, pictures, music, etc. Then put symlinks in each /home/user directory pointing to the common data partition. That way you can leave the data unformatted while not having to worry about configuration file differences.
Thank you very much for all the help. Sorry for a long delay but I’d decided
to wipe out the entire harddisk and put backup data back instead. Just a little
more time for setting up. Always feel safe with the backup in hand… :D:D:D
I have two computers, one running SuSE 10.2 and the other 11.2. Whenever I try to transfer files from one to the other, using a flash drive, I get a userid conflict – although I have the same id on both systems, the numeric id is 500 on one and 1000 on the other. What is the best way to rectify this situation? Can I change the number in /etc/passwd and then chown all of my files to the new id?
Basically yes. I recommend that you move to 1000 on 10.2. You may need to hunt down some files in odd places, if you have a mail spool, or temp files or stored data in other directories. As root on a console, I don’t recommend X.
Thanks for the advice. I was worried that a change to /etc/passwd might have unexpected consequences.
It’s actually a bit surprising that the id is stored as an ordinal number: It means that the first user on system A and the first user on system B can access each other’s files, but may not be able to access their own files on the other system!
On 2011-02-11 18:06, NonZ wrote:
>
> Thanks for the advice. I was worried that a change to /etc/passwd might
> have unexpected consequences.
Explain unexpected >:-P
> It’s actually a bit surprising that the id is stored as an ordinal
> number: It means that the first user on system A and the first user on
> system B can access each other’s files, but may not be able to access
> their own files on the other system!
Indeed.
That’s an old design, dates from unix. It is true, it uses ordinals instead
of strings.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
To the OP: Did you use the exact same user name and password you had in Ubuntu when you installed openSUSE? I made this mistake once, and a new /home directory was created, and my old /home was still there under /home/. If you don’t match them exactly with an existing /home directory, a new user and /home is created beside the old one.
Nothing surprising about that. The Unix/Linux kernel deals with integer uids wherever uids are used (e.g. process and filesystem ownership). The mapping to names for the human users is done by the userspace programs. In fact it is possible for more than one name to map to the same uid. Hint: you can create a password entry for uid 0 that is not called root, and it will be possible to login with that. PS: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should do it, but this has its uses.
It’s actually a bit surprising that the id is stored as an ordinal
number: It means that the first user on system A and the first user on
system B can access each other’s files, but may not be able to access
their own files on the other system!
System management is a task that covers ALL systems that work strongly together. Thus when you have more systems in a company/household, the system manager (or managers working strongly together) should plan how to do user/group management (like they have to have good plans about many other things like backups).
When you talk about accessing data on other closely related systems you use NFS (within Unix/Linux groups of systems) and NFS has several possibilties with regards to security and user ids (some by default).
The fact that some default mechanisms are giving you the first “non system” number for the first user you enter, must not lure you into thinking that that is the way it should be done allways. In bigger organisations (let us say when they have more then one system, sharing users and data) the system manager does not use those defaults, but has a user/group administration where (s)he sees that user ids are unique in the whole organisation and are not used again when somebody leaves.
