How to set a Home partition while keeping and accessing files inthat partition. By users

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi Guys!

I wa sthinking aobut hot to set 13.1 on my hard disk and use one partition for the system and using another partition for Home.
What I’m thinking about is if I am going to be able to keep files in that last partition and be able to access current files there once I choose to mount that partition on “/home” Or will I see all files in that partition inside of the “/home” folder.

I don’t want to format the separate home partition to keep all files in there but I’m concerned about how to mount that partition.

Thank you for your attention

2

It is not quite clear to me if you are asking this because you now want to update from an unmentioned version of openSUSE to 13.1 and want to keep a now existing /home partition, or
if you want to know what should be done best on a new 13.1 installation to be able to keep your /home partition on a future upgrade (to e.g. 13.2).

When the last is the case, the only thing to do is to see that /home is indeed a separate partition. This is btw the default the installer will offer you to do, so it is very easy.

3

Yes that’s the easy one beacuse then you choose to do an upgrade with the DVD. But I don’t want OpenSuSe to choose what to do with the Home partition I want to do that myself. Open Suse will take one partition and divide it and that’s not what I want. I want to use another partition where all my files are for the home directory without obviusly formatting that partition.

Thank you.

4

Doing an upgrade will reuse both root / and /home and will not format either. You will be presented with a summary screen before allow the install to proceed where it tells you what it is going to do. Read it carefully and proceed if it looks good to you.

Thank You,

5

I do not undestand you, sorry. Are we now talking about the first or the second case.

What I say is about the general behaviour. Saying “Open Suse will take one partition and divide it and that’s not what I want” means that you have a particular case at hand. But you informed us in no way about that particular case. Thus I can not comment on what you say here. When you want to lay that particular case before us, then give us a

fdisk -l

of the current situaltion. Explain us what you want as end result and explain to us what the installer is offering you. BTW the installer only offers you a partition based on what it found and/or what you defined earlier in the installation process. You can chance anything then to your liking.

6

Using the DVD or the LiveCD installer will launch YAST for installation. Once you setup your language, user account name and password and root password should take you to a summary screen for the live CD or straight to the partitioning menu for the DVD. Once there, select edit partition setup(this is best in case you are using efi, so the mount point for /boot/efi remains default). You should be able to see your hard drive as sda, or hda if on ide. Expand it and you should now be able to see all the present partitions and you should also be able to see the mountpoints. Edit the partition setup and set the /home mountpoint to the one you want. Make certain you first deselect the /home mountpoint already set by YAST. (when you set your /home mountpoint, make sure the Format this partition is NOT selected)

Assign a / mountpoint and click next. That is it, you can now proceed with installation normally and data will not be erased.

If you are going to dual boot with windows 8 and it has efi setup, do not remove the /boot/efi mountpoint, unless you are certain it is incorrect or anything. If the partition is FAT and has mountpoint /boot/efi, leave it like that.

Hope this helps.

Kind Regards,

7

On 2013-11-20 17:56, checoimg wrote:
>
> Hi Guys!
>
> I wa sthinking aobut hot to set 13.1 on my hard disk and use one
> partition for the system and using another partition for Home.
> What I’m thinking about is if I am going to be able to keep files in
> that last partition and be able to access current files there once I
> choose to mount that partition on “/home” Or will I see all files in
> that partition inside of the “/home” folder.

I think I understand. You currently have a “/home” directory, part of
the root partition, and you want access to those files after you add a
separate “/home” partition.

You can not access in any manner the files in a directory once you mount
a partition on it.

Well, you install without a separate home partition. Instead, at some
point (during the install or later), you add a temporary partition, say
“/newhome”.

Install ‘mc’ (midnight commander). It is a powerful text mode file
browser which you might find useful later.

Then, you switch to runlevel 3 (I would say 2, but it does not exist).
Make sure there are no users logged in: only you logged directly as root
(no, not as user then “su”). In text mode.

Now you can do this:

  • rename “/home” directory to “/oldhome”
  • umount “/newhome”
  • Edit /etc/fstab, change the line with “newhome” to “home”. You can use
    “joe” or “mcedit”.
  • mount “/home”.
  • copy all contents from “/oldhome” to “/home”. I suggest you use “mc”.

Done. Test by login as user on another text terminal. If it works,
switch to runlevel 5. Now really done.

Eventually, you can delete “/oldhome” to increase space on “/”.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

8

Thank you guys for all the responses. Sorry I wasn’t clear.

Here is the output of fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk label type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc0b63f98

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 2048 718847 358400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 718848 180000767 89640960 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 * 180002814 360003583 90000385 5 Extended /System and swap partition are here, sda5 and sda6/
/dev/sda4 360003584 976773119 308384768 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /I want to set home here./
/dev/sda5 180002816 344002815 82000000 83 Linux /* I want to format this partition and install the new OS here */
/dev/sda6 344004608 360003583 7999488 82 Linux swap / Solaris

The partition that I want to use for home already has files and I’m concerned about if I will be able to see those files after I do set the mount point there as “/home”. Also I have no idea if just setting the mount point “/home” in that hard disk would actually make teh installer set that partition for the home of users.

9

Just chose what you want at the partitioning section. You can set the partition and mount points any way you want.

10

Well I will just go into Live session open Nautilus, mount the current system partition (sda5), open Nautilus with gnomesu, erase everything in the mentioned partition except the home folder, enter to live install, choose to mount sda5 on “/”, choose to mount sda4 on “/home” and install without formatting any partition.

So I will still have home in the original place and if this works I just move the files to the new home folder. If that doesn’t work and my home folder is still set on the system’s partition I just take that “/home” entry from fstab to stop mounting that partition on start up and I will be on the same place as before.

Sounds like a good plan to me. I will tell you guys tomorrow about how it goes and maybe some of you already knows how it will go.

Have a good one everyone!

11

On 2013-11-21 01:36, checoimg wrote:

> The partition that I want to use for home already has files and I’m
> concerned about if I will be able to see those files after I do set the
> mount point there as “/home”. Also I have no idea if just setting the
> mount point “/home” in that hard disk would actually make teh installer
> set that partition for the home of users.

If you tell yast to “use” an existing partition for “/home”, and you
make sure it does not format it (there is not an ‘F’ in the list) then
the contents remain.

You have to be careful if there is that ‘F’. Format means destroy
everything inside.

Also if you reuse a partition for the system without formatting it ("/",
“/usr”), the old contents are not deleted but files are rewritten with
new files - and some old files remain. The result is probably a broken
system.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

12

Thanks for pointing about the F and for the advice about getting a broken system.
I don’t have that many changes on the home folder so not likely to brake what isn’t there.

13

On 2013-11-21 04:16, checoimg wrote:

> Thanks for pointing about the F and for the advice about getting a
> broken system.
> I don’t have that many changes on the home folder so not likely to brake
> what isn’t there.

Notice that I differentiated between system directories (like /usr or /)
and /home. It is not the same method for each.

One you must always format, the other you must never format. One you
never reuse, the other you always reuse.

Be careful and try harder to understand.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

14

First, please use CODE tags around your copied/pasted computer text. It is tthe # button in the tool bar of the post editor.

sda4 as you have it now is not a Linux file system. When you want to use it for your /home, you must create a file system (“format it”) of a Linux type on it (e.g. ext4). That wil remove all and everything that is now on it. And even when you would be able to use the existing file system and mount it on /home, who would be the owner of those files? What are those files? which operating system put them there?

To me it looks as if you do not quite understand the concepts of the Unix/Linux directory tree (there is but one, contrary to some other operating systems) and what mounting of file systems on a directory means. Maybe it helps when you read SDB:Basics of partitions, filesystems, mount points - openSUSE

15

Well I was just about to do what I said but it really looks like it is not going to work because it will add an fstab entry and that doesn’t mean the system will be configured to store home user folders there. So until some documentation says it will work I will not try it

I’ll keep in mind the # button for code posting.

Thanks for the link! :smiley: I’m new to OpenSuSE and didn’t know about the SDB.

16

It would be helpful to know what you want to accomplish - to understand your reasons for wanting to have multiple partitions set up in a certain manner.

I am not a openSUSE expert but I have been using multiple partitions and operating systems for twenty years and this is how I understand it:

Separating the operating system from applications and data is better because:

1.- OS’s must be updated or re-installed and can become corrupted;

2.- The size of a partition required for an OS can be calculated more easily than for the other two, since a user may want to install any number, size and type of applications at any time (and are usually installed to the /home partitions, when one exists), so you can avoid running out of operating system space by having a home partition; and

3.- The same Data can be shared using multiple OS’s.

So I have always tried to maintain my data on partitions that could be accessed by any OS, separate from the OS’s and applications.

That means at least 3 separate partitions should be created (aside from Swap and perhaps, boot) and particularly, a separate data partition (which is the most valuable part of a computer and is what you most need to back up.

Disk partitioning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Talks about some of that. And

List of disk partitioning software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mentions some of tools to partition with (including gparted).

I am assuming that your reasons are similar to mine, and I generally make my home partition twice as big as the root /. And with Linux, none of them have to primary partitions.

17

So you don’t advice to mix DATA and Home partition. Just like the installer suggests a separate home partition. I use 100 GB for each OS in the case of Linux based OS some of that goes to swap. So that leaves me with 300 GB for data which is just perfect for me. I’m not willing to have to transfer more than that in case of HDD crash or whatever reason instead I keep periodically transfers of files I don’t usually do or I;m done working with to external HDD’s. I have Double Backup.

So I guess I need a 720 GB HDD if I want to keep like this then 100 GB for WIndows, 120 for Open suse system (including swap), 200 GB for Home (that’s a lot) and 300 GB for Data. Note I constantly use 100+ GB of data so I only really have less than 200 GB free.

18

On 2013-11-22 01:26, checoimg wrote:
> So I guess I need a 720 GB HDD if I want to keep like this then 100 GB
> for WIndows, 120 for Open suse system (including swap), 200 GB for Home
> (that’s a lot) and 300 GB for Data. Note I constantly use 100+ GB of
> data so I only really have less than 200 GB free.

Data goes on home.

Unless you have a server; then /srv would be another partition (ftp,
http, etc), or a database, where “/var/lib/mysql” would be another
partition. Or mail server, then /var/mail would be another.

etc.

In those cases, arguably, the “data” would go to another disk, or even
another type of storage solution.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)