(Of course, this should be trivial, but I may just have made it too complex)
I started with OpenSUSE 13.2 on a 400Gb SATA drive. My goal is to upgrade to 42.2 on an SSD, have my home directory on a separate 1TB SATA drive (I’ll call it my “data” drive), and have my previous home directory show up as my home directory on the new drive.
So far:
42.2 installed on SSD, done and works. (A new install was recommended to me rather than an upgrade)
All files copied from Old home directory onto the new data drive. Done. (all files and all “hidden” files. By hidden, I mean those files whose name stats with a “.”) I mention the “hidden” files because I use kmail for my e-mail, and it stores the mail messages in a “hidden” directory. It is important to me to have access to all of these “old” e-mail messages.
I changed fstab on the 42.2 installation to mount my old home directory at “/home/mark”. Now, 42.2 does not boot. (all I see is a blank screen) I changed fstab back to not mount my old home directory, and booting goes easily.
So, I think what is wrong is that there are some config (or start up) files in the new 42.2 home directory for me which are different from the ones in 13.2 .
Realizing that a big goal is to have access to my previous e-mails in addition to all the files that I have saved in my old home directory, what should I be doing differently with my home directory so that I can have a working system?
If this is not clear, I’ll happily clarify if you ask.
Did you copy data from one partition to another for home?? if so it will have a different UUID. See current values in /dev/disk/by-uuid. These are links to the underlying /dev/sdX# files which connect to the partitions. sdX# syntax may not be stable since adding removing drive can change it but UUID is always the same for a given partition
You can use Yast - partitions management to set the partition you want to mount as home
Note if no home partition then a /home directory is created and used on the root partition. It hurts nothing to overlay a mount point but the data just becomes inaccessible but still exists on the partition
As gogalthorpe says, the UUID must be correct. Thus see:
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
and check if the UUID you use in the fstab is there and when yes, if it belongs to the correct partition.
I hope we all, including the OP, understand that the home directory of user mark, /home/mark, is on a separate file system and /home is not.
This might deviate from the most used setup, but is of course correct and the OP may have a reason for it.
(please note that I’ve put the OpenSUSE 13.2 drive back into the system, so I can do this work. In above: sda is the OpenSUSE 42.2 disk, sdb is the data disk and sdc is the OpenSUSE 13.2 disk.
Maybe we must check if it is mountable at all. As root
mount -t xfs /dev/disk/by-uuid/2be459f0-db30-4907-96af-ae71e2505b1b /mnt
and see if it mounts and/or there are messages.
Also, let us check your mount point
ls -l /home/mark
BTW, it is best to post computer text complete. That is including the prompts (at start and end) and the command. A little bit larger sweep with mouse and we can then see exactly what your working directory was and the exact command, etc. Much information without much talking.
Now here is what is in /home/mark on the leap system. (note that I’m running this command from the 13.2 system)
mark:/mnt/extra/etc # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
mark:/mnt/extra/etc # ls /mnt/home/mark -l
total 200
drwx------ 2 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:31 .QtWebEngineProcess
-rw------- 1 mark users 49 Jan 29 08:28 .Xauthority
-rw------- 1 mark users 51 Jan 29 08:46 .bash_history
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1177 Jan 28 13:47 .bashrc
drwxr-xr-x 8 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:43 .cache
drwx------ 13 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:46 .config
drwx------ 3 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 .dbus
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1637 Jan 28 13:47 .emacs
-rw------- 1 mark users 16 Jan 28 13:48 .esd_auth
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 .fonts
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 367 Jan 28 13:48 .gtkrc-2.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 305 Jan 28 13:47 .i18n
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 861 Jan 28 13:47 .inputrc
drwxr-xr-x 3 mark users 4096 Jan 28 14:03 .kde4
drwx------ 2 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:31 .kmail2
drwx------ 3 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 .local
drwx------ 4 mark users 4096 Jan 28 14:03 .mozilla
drwx------ 3 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:31 .pki
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1028 Jan 28 13:47 .profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1952 Jan 28 13:47 .xim.template
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mark users 1112 Jan 28 13:47 .xinitrc.template
-rw------- 1 mark users 0 Jan 29 08:28 .xsession-errors
-rw------- 1 mark users 72175 Jan 29 08:46 .xsession-errors-:0
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Downloads
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Music
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Public
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Templates
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Videos
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:47 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:47 public_html
mark:/mnt/extra/etc #
OK, I guess we have some confusion here. I was reading all this as being from the 42.2 system (as being bootable without that one fstab entry). This seems to be not the case.
When you run the 13.2 system, you can only list the fstab from the 42.2 system when you first mount thye root partition of 42.2 on the running 13.2. You seem to have mounted this at /mnt/extra. Is that correct? You never explained that.
When that is the case, the test mount I gave you is incorrect, because /mnt is already in use. In that case first create a new mount point and mount. But don’t do that while /mnt/extra is your working directory!
cd /mnt
mkdir testmark
mount -t xfs /dev/disk/by-uuid/2be459f0-db30-4907-96af-ae71e2505b1b /mnt/testmark
If that succeeds, you can do an
ls -l testmark
and I wiill believe you,no need to post, when you report that that is OK.
Then about the mount point test. With the 42.2 mounted at /mnt/extra that test should be
home won’t be in the path unless you made a /mnt/extra/home mount point. a home partition does not have home, home is the mount point you should only see user subdirectories. The home partition simply has what is contained in the /home directory not the home directory name.
Or I’m confused here or the setup is very much not standard.
What normally and very loosely is called “home partition” is a file system mounted on the /home directory as a mount point. That many, many people do this (and you seem to call "standard system) does not mean that there are no other configurations possible. In fact you can mount any file system on any directory. In this case the OP wants to mount an xfs file system on /home/mark. Why not? Don’t even try to understand why. He has his own reasons.
We are only trying to find out why this mount, while defined in /etc/fstab, does stop his system from booting correctly. Because a mount going wrong at boot (except when the noauto and/or the nofail options are added) will stop booting, I assume the mount goes wrong.
Thus I try to find out what is wrong.
First test, can the file system be mounted somewhere at all.
Second test, is the directory used as mount point correct (existence).
BTW, to the OP. Did you look at the boot screen (after pressing Esc) to see what happens and where it got stuck?
Now, I’m a bit confused. Are you asking me to boot into 42.2 or to see if, while running 13.2, I get those results?
So, I’m trying this:
I have the 13.2 system running now.
Here is what I did, and the results:
mark:/mnt # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/extra
mark:/mnt # ls /mnt/extra
bin boot dev etc home lib lib64 lost+found mnt opt proc root run sbin selinux srv sys tmp usr var
mark:/mnt # ls -l /mnt/extra/home/mark
total 200
drwx------ 2 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:31 .QtWebEngineProcess
-rw------- 1 mark users 49 Jan 29 08:28 .Xauthority
-rw------- 1 mark users 51 Jan 29 08:46 .bash_history
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1177 Jan 28 13:47 .bashrc
drwxr-xr-x 8 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:43 .cache
drwx------ 13 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:46 .config
drwx------ 3 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 .dbus
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1637 Jan 28 13:47 .emacs
-rw------- 1 mark users 16 Jan 28 13:48 .esd_auth
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 .fonts
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 367 Jan 28 13:48 .gtkrc-2.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 305 Jan 28 13:47 .i18n
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 861 Jan 28 13:47 .inputrc
drwxr-xr-x 3 mark users 4096 Jan 28 14:03 .kde4
drwx------ 2 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:31 .kmail2
drwx------ 3 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 .local
drwx------ 4 mark users 4096 Jan 28 14:03 .mozilla
drwx------ 3 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:31 .pki
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1028 Jan 28 13:47 .profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1952 Jan 28 13:47 .xim.template
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mark users 1112 Jan 28 13:47 .xinitrc.template
-rw------- 1 mark users 0 Jan 29 08:28 .xsession-errors
-rw------- 1 mark users 72175 Jan 29 08:46 .xsession-errors-:0
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Downloads
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Music
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Public
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Templates
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Videos
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:47 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:47 public_html
mark:/mnt #
Looks like you mounted root partition not home partition what you see is in /mnt/extra/home/mark is the default /home directory created when you ran with out the home partition mounted in 42.2 it contains none of the data from the 13.2 home just a skeleton. Home has no system directories like you show they are only on root
Right.The way I set the system up, /home is not a separate partition. Instead, /home/mark is where the files from 13.2 are supposed to be mounted. What I showed was what /home/mark looks like without the data from 13.2 being mounted. This all made me wonder if those files in /home/mark get something important written to them before the 13.2 data is mounted and then when the system tries to continue startup, it can’t find the data because the 13.2 data “hides” the files that are in /home/mark? (Is that clear?).
You mean files with a period as fist character. ie hidden?
That should not hurt anything you can still copy them ls -a while list all files including hidden ones cp will also copy them
What was suggested and I’m not sure you did was to see if the new home partition is mountable or if the FS is broken which the failure to mount seems to indicate. If you can see all the disks then you can cp the files from either OS to the new partition. Then set it to mount in 42.2 in yast.
Be sure not to include /home in the copy just the content of home since that would make it /home/home/mark which won’t work
After some confusion we now know you are running 13.2 with the root partition of 42.2 mouted at /mnt/extra. And I did not ask you to change that. I adapted the statements to the situation as is.
And I want you to check the mount point you are going to use when you are going to run 42.2 That mount point (/home/mark on 42.2) is** now, while running 13.2,** on /mnt/extra/home/mark
And the statements I offered you are clearly showing that path also.
And I am not going to try to interpret all what you post as long as it is not what I ask, because I am afraid to come to conclusions when I think 13.2 is running while in fact 42.2 is.
And you may have missed another question of mine:
Did you check what is going on during 42.2 boot (pressing the ESC key) to see what happens and where it got stuck.
In other words “all I see is a blank screen” is not an adequate description. When you start the system, at least some BIOS screen comes up, and the you should get GRUB. Do you realy see nothing of this and only “blank” (you may mean black) screen?
You did not do what I suggested. I normaly do check and recheck what I ask to be done. When you do then different then please explain why and what. I am not your master and you are not my slave, so you are fully in your rights when you do not do what I ask, or do different. Bur I spend my spare time on your problem. So at least explain why you do so.
The starting point is still your 13.2 running with the root partition of the 42.2 mounted at /mnt/extra.
I asked for
cd /mnt
mkdir testmark
mount -t xfs /dev/disk/by-uuid/2be459f0-db30-4907-96af-ae71e2505b1b /mnt/testmark
Never saw it.
And from the same system
ls -l /mnt/extra/home
ls -l /mnt/extra/home/mark
Again never saw it.
We are now still at the point we were at post #7 above. Not much progress. Please post what I asked for or explain why you will not do it.
My apologies. I thought I gave this to you in #12. Anyway, here is what you requested…
mark:/mnt # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/extra # /dev/sda1 is the 42.2 system.
mark:/mnt # ls # showing that the testmark directory exists
JudezData cdrom extra sdb1 testmark
mark:/mnt # mount -t xfs /dev/disk/by-uuid/2be459f0-db30-4907-96af-ae71e2505b1b /mnt/testmark
mark:/mnt # ls -l /mnt/extra/home
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 22 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:31 mark
mark:/mnt # ls -l /mnt/extra/home/mark
total 200
drwx------ 2 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:31 .QtWebEngineProcess
-rw------- 1 mark users 49 Jan 29 08:28 .Xauthority
-rw------- 1 mark users 51 Jan 29 08:46 .bash_history
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1177 Jan 28 13:47 .bashrc
drwxr-xr-x 8 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:43 .cache
drwx------ 13 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:46 .config
drwx------ 3 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 .dbus
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1637 Jan 28 13:47 .emacs
-rw------- 1 mark users 16 Jan 28 13:48 .esd_auth
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 .fonts
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 367 Jan 28 13:48 .gtkrc-2.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 305 Jan 28 13:47 .i18n
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 861 Jan 28 13:47 .inputrc
drwxr-xr-x 3 mark users 4096 Jan 28 14:03 .kde4
drwx------ 2 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:31 .kmail2
drwx------ 3 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 .local
drwx------ 4 mark users 4096 Jan 28 14:03 .mozilla
drwx------ 3 mark users 4096 Jan 29 08:31 .pki
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1028 Jan 28 13:47 .profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark users 1952 Jan 28 13:47 .xim.template
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mark users 1112 Jan 28 13:47 .xinitrc.template
-rw------- 1 mark users 0 Jan 29 08:28 .xsession-errors
-rw------- 1 mark users 72175 Jan 29 08:46 .xsession-errors-:0
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Downloads
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Music
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Public
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Templates
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:48 Videos
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:47 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark users 4096 Jan 28 13:47 public_html
mark:/mnt #
a) the file system is mountable and contains what you think it should.
b) on your 42.2 system there is a /home directory which contains only one directory: mark.
Both do have the correct owners and permissions. One strange thing though. /home/mark still has (old?) data in it. That is not a problem in sofar that when the mount you want succeeds, all that data will be unreachable and the mounted home directory will be the actual data. But that old data is still on the root partition of 42.2 and thus takes space there. You could keep it there untiil all is running to satisfaction, but my advice would be to remove it then.
Now a next step could be to umount from /mnt/testmark and mount the same on /mnt/extra/home/mark. It would then be in it’s correct place in reference to your 42.2.
But, I also asked you to boot into 42.2 and describe what happens. Just saying “blank screen” is not much. Please describe a least in short what you see, like BIOS screen ? Grub screen > anything? In any case, you should soon after you used Grub (or after it times out), thus when the real boot starts hit the Esc key to see what happens. Because that is the point where something goes wrong.
You show what is on the directory IN 42.2 root not what is in the new home partition at /mnt/testmark which should not have a home directory it should be only the contents of home you presumably copied to it In any case the partition mounts OK and should be usable assuming the FS is not corupt.
Note UUID is just a like to some /dev/sdX# it only matters at boot since the order of the disks may change depending on what you have plugged in so UUID is preverbal there since it is constant but for commands after boot you can use sdX# format which is much easier to deal with just remember that with sdX# the X value can change depending on what you have plugged
