Using YaST Partitioner on USB drive results in home directory not mounting

English Install/Boot/Login
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Hello all,

I was in the process of making a BIOS flash USB drive for my desktop from my laptopm which is running Tumbleweed. I ran YaST Partitioner to clear a thumb drive that had been previously used as install media for a Fedora install on another machine.

Because this process required that I create a FAT32 filesystem, I cleared the partitions that had previously created by Fedora Media Writer when making the install media.

I was careful to only view removable media, and I very carefully made sure to only make any modifications to this drive.

The first time I tried to do this, it generated an error (which I don’t recall, but it said something about an unexpected error, and it referenced the home directory).

I put the file needed on the flash drive, renamed it the required name…went to my desktop…successfully completed the process, but ended up still stuck.

I came back to my laptop, and I was going to try a different BIOS version on the stick.

When I inserted the stick this time, it was not generating any visible system response. It didn’t offer to mount it. It was not visible in either Dolphin or YaST Partitioner.

I made no changes in YaST Partitioner this time, but I decided to reboot, to see if it would clear this odd situation where the media was not mounting.

When I rebooted, I was unable to login to a normal desktop session. I used Ctrl-Alt-F2 to see what happened when I logged in at the command line. I was able to login, but I got an error stating:

– ncfoster: /home/ncfoster: change directory failed: No such file or directory
Logging in with home = “/”.

While trying to search for an answer to this problem, I came across people discussing SubVolumes and Snapshots, but this is my first time thinking about these concepts. So, I am really swimming when it comes to thinking about how to mount, what to mount, how to fix the configuration for my user account to make this happen normally, or how to copy/backup any files before going any further.

My drive shows that I have 37.8 GiB free out of 455.3 GiB. While I don’t remember precisely how much space I had, I don’t immediately feel like anything is amiss there, but I am not entirely sure.

I am presently logged into the machine on the desktop through the root user, limping along without any of my usual settings from my own user account.

Thankfully, I don’t believe there is much data on this account that I will miss in the worst case, but ideally, I’d like to get this back up and running with all of my data.

All help is greatly appreciated. I don’t know if there is an obvious answer to what I might have done here, or a log file that I can check to get that answer. While I have been running Linux for several years now, I am not well-versed enough in this to know where to begin. Thank you.

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Hello and welcome to the openSUSE forums.

Please understand that while we love a good textual explanation about a problem, we even more value real facts as presented by the system. Thus instead of saying vague things like "My drive shows that I have 37.8 GiB free out of 455.3 GiB. " you should post why you come to such a conclusion. In this case you could at least post

fdisk -l

and

lsblk -f

And because you report problems with /home

ls -l /home

That is the way to offer people the chance to see strange things.

BTW, technical about posting these computer texts

And post as complete as possible. That is starting with the line with the prompt and the command, then all output, and ending with the new prompt line.
When you really feel you need to change anything in such a copy, then explain that in a comment, else we take all characters literally.

1 Like
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Thank you for your response. I understand the need for technical details. At the time, I wasn’t sure the best way to state that details about disk space. The most accurate thing that I can say to clarify that is that in Dolphin, the Properties dialog for the SSD in question shows this:

image

As stated before, I am presently logged in as root, since I cannot properly login under my primary account. As root, here are the results of what you referenced.

localhost:~ # fdisk -l
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 465.76 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: WD Blue SN570 500GB                     
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 38BD4DFE-2DBA-4767-A1E1-FA11292213B3

Device             Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1      4096    589823    585728   286M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2    591872  17778687  17186816   8.2G Linux filesystem
/dev/nvme0n1p3  17778688 972578815 954800128 455.3G Linux filesystem
/dev/nvme0n1p4 972578816 976773134   4194319     2G Linux swap

localhost:~ # lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1                                                                            
├─nvme0n1p1 vfat   FAT32       7284-F4F7                             273.4M     4% /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 swap   1           b6583d71-7b04-4656-814a-ac4595aad895                
├─nvme0n1p3 btrfs              10ba16e8-3fd9-4796-b9d9-dfcbfcc3e454   37.6G    90% /var
│                                                                                  /usr/local
│                                                                                  /boot/grub2/x86_64-efi
│                                                                                  /srv
│                                                                                  /opt
│                                                                                  /boot/grub2/i386-pc
│                                                                                  /root
│                                                                                  /.snapshots
│                                                                                  /
└─nvme0n1p4 swap   1           1d1a4a69-989c-4693-9d4e-1d426d037d34                [SWAP]

localhost:~ # ls -l /home
total 0

Does this information give you any insights? I also just ran these as my other user account through a terminal. The results seem to be the same, which makes sense to me, but I could have missed a minute detail.

I greatly appreciate your time and assistance. I posted the first message shortly before going to bed, and I am just getting back to it. I am sorry for the long delay. I should be around for a while now to provide any additional required details for several hours.

4

I don’t seem to be able to edit my prior post now, but I hope that you see this first. I have solved the problem with the help of a friend.

I had to add the following to my /etc/fstab:

UUID=10ba16e8-3fd9-4796-b9d9-dfcbfcc3e454  /home                    btrfs  subvol=/@/home                 0  0

Thank you again for your response. I hope this helps someone else in the future.

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