Arch Linux

xcausex

Member

Registered: 2010-08-27

Posts: 12

[SOLVED] Finding missing home folder

Ok, I just got some new hardware and was finally able to try out an x86-64 distro, which made me want to give Arch another go in hopes that some old compatibility issues I had would have died with my old hardware (which they greatfully did).

My issue started out where after install my old home folder from Mint was apparently missing. So what I did was try mounting my home partition to a temp folder to see what it showed and I was surprised to see that my old home folder was there, but my current one was not. I then looked closer at my current home folder and noticed that the free space shown for it was closer to what my / partition had. This got me wondering if something was wrong with my fstab file, so I went in that and found that when I added noatime flags to a few of my partitions that I mis-typed it for the partition for my home folders (noaatime instead of noatime).

I corrected this mistake, saved, and rebooted and found I wasn't allowed to start up my desktop, because now my current Arch user home directory is missing, presumably orphaned on my / partition.

What I would like to know is if there is a way to recover this now missing folder. I would like to recover a downloaded file in it and perhaps relocate the whole thing into the proper partition for my home directory. Also, even if I can't it's not a big deal, besides the fact that I would want to purge the folder if it is orphaned and still taking up space in my / partition.

If anyone can help point me in the right direction, I would be very grateful.

Last edited by xcausex (2011-06-21 19:18:56)

oliver

Member

Registered: 2007-12-12

Posts: 448

Re: [SOLVED] Finding missing home folder

I may have totally misunderstood, but I think that your old mint home dir is on a file-system that you mount on /home.  But, your Arch home dir is in /home on the root file-system.  So when you mount /home it "hides" the Arch home dir underneath the newly mounted file-system

To fix (if this is correct)...
1) log out of all sessions
2) log in as root
3) # umount /home
4) # cd /home

At this point, your old mint home dir should be gone and the new Arch one available
5) # mv <your_username> /
6) # cd /
7) # mount /home
8) # cd /home
9) # mv <your_username> <your_username>.old
10) # mv /<your_username> .

Last edited by oliver (2011-06-21 19:03:34)

xcausex

Member

Registered: 2010-08-27

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] Finding missing home folder

Sweet, that sounds about right. Going to try it now. I'll update this post after I give it a go.

*UPDATE*

You were right on with that solution, worked perfectly for me. Thanks a ton.

Last edited by xcausex (2011-06-21 19:18:18)

oliver

Member

Registered: 2007-12-12

Posts: 448

Re: [SOLVED] Finding missing home folder

nice...

I've always thought that mounting over the top of a non-empty dir should create a warning or something.  Maybe it's an option in 'mount' that I've never bothered to look up