Recently I reinstalled ubuntu and created two partitions. The whole system was on an SSD and / home was inside the other partition, in HD. However, I wanted the / home to stay on the SSD and the HD to be a second / home, just for files. Can someone help me?
NOTE: I can not deallocate memory from /home on HD if i have the risk of losing my files. If possible I wanted to create a / home on the SSD and rename the old / home so there is no conflict in the system.
/home partition in the HDD to the default configuration where /home is a folder in /, which is in the SSDWe will do this from a Live USB running Ubuntu 18.04 so that we can work with the /home partition and mount it as /internal_home.
Select the Try Ubuntu without Installing option as we want to run Ubuntu from the USB, not the internal SSD.
/home and / PartitionsOpen a terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T and enter:
sudo blkid > myUUIDs.txt
Keep the terminal open and go to Files (also known as Nautilus) and find the file myUUIDs.txt and open it by double clicking so that you can easily copy and paste the UUIDs of your internal drives' /home and / partitions. You will need them later.
/home and / PartitionsAs this is just temporary, it does not matter what the mount points are. You can use Nautilus to click and mount them. However, the autogenerated mountpoints are hard to type. So we will use command line to create 2 mountpoints and mount the two partitions there.
First, make some temporary folders as mount points
sudo mkdir /internal_root
sudo mkdir /internal_home
Second, mount the two internal partitions
I assume:
1234-UUID-OF-SYSTEM-PARTITION is your internal / (root) partition
and1234-UUID-OF-HOME-PARTITION is your current home partition.Copy and paste the correct UUIDs into the terminal from Step 2 above before using.
sudo mount --uuid 1234-UUID-OF-SYSTEM-PARTITION /internal_root
sudo mount --uuid 1234-UUID-OF-HOME-PARTITION /internal_home
/Use the following command to copy everything in the old /home partition to the new /home folder. Note, you don't need to create the folder as it was created as a mountpoint for the partition.
sudo rsync -aXS --exclude='/*/.gvfs' /internal_home/. /internal_root/home/.
We need a new pountpoint for the old home so that we can use it to store data I will call it oldhome. Use the following command:
sudo mkdir //internal_root/oldhome
Note: I don't recommend mounting the old home under /media. This folder is usually reserved for the system to autmetically mount partitions temporarily.
An alternate would be to create the oldhome folder under the existing /mnt folder with the command:
sudo mkdir //internal_root/mnt/oldhome
/etc/fstab to mount the oldhome automatically when Ubuntu startsUse the following command to open /etc/fstab in gedit with administrative privilages.
sudo -H gedit /internal_root/etc/fstab
Look for the line like line with the UUID of your home partition. See Step 2 for the UUID. Change it to look like this:
UUID=1234-UUID-OF-HOME-PARTITION /oldhome ext4 defaults 0 2
where 1234-UUID-OF-HOME-PARTITION is the UUID number of the old /home partition as found on Step 2. Note, in this file we don't include the /internal_root/ prefix as when we created the oldhome folder.
Save the file and exit gedit.
If all goes well your /home is not in the default location in the SSD.
To access the /oldhome partition with Nautilus you will need to go to Other Locations on the left margin and click on the Computer icon and navigate to oldhome.
Hope this helps
I'll try to answer with no-live-boot-required method.
e keyinit=/bin/bash at the endmount -o remount,rw /mkdir /mnt/newhomemount /homemount /dev/ssd_partition /mnt/newhomecp -rp /home/* /mnt/newhome//etc/fstab entry for /home mountpoint accordingly
This is a 1y old question but for those coming across...
I Think you miss to delete the old /home which it's still in the filesystem wasting space (have a look at the dimension of the / (root) partition)
so as explained in the other answers copy/sync all files in new partition
you do not need a live image
To make your life easy, give to the partition a lable other than a name so that disks will create a mount point using given lable in /media/username
sudo rsync -aXS --exclude='/*/.gvfs' /home/. /media/my_user/home/.
# UUID=1234-YOUR-UID /home ext4 defaults 0 2
To make sure in which home folder I'm looking into, I usually create an empty file (this is optional)
$ touch /media/my_user/home/blahhhhh
reboot in safe mode and get a root shell (easy, just follow the messages on screen)
look into /home, you should not see file /home/blahhhhh
$ ls /home
because the new /home has not been mounted (line in fstab is commented ) instead the portion of / filesystem in available.
if you want to double check your new home partition has all files in it, mount it and look for file /home/blahhhhh
$ mkdir /new_home $ mount /dev/the_new_home_partition /new_home $ ls /new_home
*you may want to use /dev/dev_name instead the UUID: it is shorter to write.*
if your are happy... delete all files from old home
WARNING !!!!! be sure where you are, what are you doing... no way back
$ rm -fr /home/*
WARNING !!!!!
the new home candidate partition is still mounted at /new_home
edit /etc/fstab and un-comment (delete #) the entry for /home
UUID=1234-YOUR-UID /home ext4 defaults 0 2
8.reboot
check the space partition mounted on / (root)
Try to understand what you are doing... if you mistake, you loose everything...
