Mount /home to its own partition

CrusheD_LameR — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:00:38 +0000

Yesterday, I formatted my laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 9.04, luckily i don’t have to backup all of my files, as I stored my files under the /home partition…Having the “/home” directory tree on it’s own partition has several advantages, the most common known advantages perhaps we can reinstall OS or even a different distro of Linux without loosing all the data. We can done this by keeping the /home partition unchanged and reinstalling the OS which goes in the “/” which means root directory, the root directory also can be on a seperate partition.

It is real simple to move the “/home” to it’s own partition. What we need to do is:-

Create a partition of sufficient size for your “/home” directory. You may have to use new hard drive, or adjust/resize the existing partition on your current hard-drive to do this. Im sure you know what it means..so let we skip this.

After you upgraded your Linux OS, you will notice that new / directory with new /home are made, what you need to do is change the current /home on new OS to /home_old

$sudo mv home/ home_old/

Next, create new home on / directory

$sudo mkdir home

$sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sda5 /mnt/Windows

Please note that, sda1 on my laptop is my OS partition, and sda5 is my “/home” directory, and also sda3 is partition for my Windows XP

And next, we need to update the /etc/fstab, just add the following line on /etc/fstab

/dev/sda5 /home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 5

the /dev/sda5 is my /home partition to be mounted on /home using ext3 filesystem, ’0′ means my harddisk and ’5′ means my partition for /home

After you done all the setting above, and you confirm that you’re correct, then you can delete home_old

$sudo rm -r home_old/

Next, reboot your machine, and you will get your old bookmark, desktop setting, home/ files and folders..

Good Luck…~!

MohdAzam » mount home partition

Mount /home to its own partition