Arch Linux

WernerL

Member

Registered: 2007-07-03

Posts: 161

Moved /home to another partition, but now /home stil contains data :-)

Hello folks,

Lets first tell you how my situation WAS.
I had 1 harddrive with 3 partitions:
/dev/sda1        Windows partition
/dev/sda2        linux swap
/dev/sda3        Linux ext3

My archlinux installation is on sda3. Now I bought a new extra SATA 2 harddrive and made 2 partitons on it.

After I did that I copied my whole /home directory to 1 partition and edited my fstab. And guess what? It works great ! Now I have my /home partition seperated from my archlinux installation. But one problem, there is still some data on the /home dir of sda3. When I go to /home I (ofcourse) only can see the data that is on /dev/sdb2 sow how can I delete the data that is in the sda3 /home ?

Is there an quick and easy solution for this? :-)

Last edited by WernerL (2008-01-25 14:31:01)

pressh

Developer/TU

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2005-08-14

Posts: 1,719

Re: Moved /home to another partition, but now /home stil contains data :-)

login as root (non gui)
unmount /dev/sdb2 partition (your new HOME)

you now only have the old stuff in /home
go the /home and remove everything that you don't want there to be which is also on the other partition

mount /dev/sdb2 to /home again
logout as root

WernerL

Member

Registered: 2007-07-03

Posts: 161

Re: Moved /home to another partition, but now /home stil contains data :-)

How do I log in as root with no GUI?
Need to  choose fallback in lilo? (didn't try that one before). Also tried in loginmanager the failsafe terminal but that didn't work.

Sin.citadel

Member

Registered: 2008-01-22

Posts: 267

Re: Moved /home to another partition, but now /home stil contains data :-)

use the command

su -

this will put u in root mode , then follow pressh's solution

WernerL

Member

Registered: 2007-07-03

Posts: 161

Re: Moved /home to another partition, but now /home stil contains data :-)

yes I know that
But how do I come into non-GUI mode after I installed X? I could delete the GDM deamon in my rc.conf and restart my computer but that's a little bit to much work... hope there is an easier solution.. :-)

[root@WernerPC ~]# umount /dev/sdb2
umount: /home: device is busy
umount: /home: device is busy

This is what I get when logged in into X.

Last edited by WernerL (2008-01-25 16:59:01)

bender02

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2007-02-04

Posts: 1,328

Re: Moved /home to another partition, but now /home stil contains data :-)

When you are still not logged in (ie. in gdm), press ctrl+alt+f1 (or f2,..f6). This should take you to a console login. Login as root. (If you want to shutdown X, run /etc/rc.d/gdm stop, but it shouldn't be necessary). Now you should be able to unmount /home partition, do whatever maintenance you need to do. Then logout, and by pressing alt+f7 you should get back to gdm.

EDIT: I forgot to say, before you logout as root, you should mount /home back of course.

Last edited by bender02 (2008-01-25 17:03:49)

WernerL

Member

Registered: 2007-07-03

Posts: 161

Re: Moved /home to another partition, but now /home stil contains data :-)

Thanks bender02 !
Got the job done. :-)