Questions:Setting up seperate partitions for root, /home, /media

[jfg69]

I have done the /home partition following the psychocats tutorial, and it worked perfectly.

What brings me here at this moment is my latest blunder, um- adventure. I was updating some packages and added debian repositories to my synaptic, and hit update, walked away, pretty much updating some 995 odd files. Well, long story short, my Ultimate Edition 1.6 broke, but my /home is still standing and accessible.

This was good for a number of reasons, first being it forced me to install 1.7...
Now my question...

How ( easy enuff to figure out I think) so maybe it should be CAN or SHOULD- I mount my seperate /home partition as a replacement for the /home that installed with 1.7? Is there a better, wiser way to do this? I was hoping to keep all my settings and passwords and all those stupid little things we set up and take for granted after a while all back in place.

I was going to specify the existing partition as the /home directory upon installing 1.7, but I wasnt sure if it would get overwritten...I didnt have room to back it up fully, since its about 275GB.

Any thoughts, suggestions or flaming?

jfg69

[DaddyX3]

Hey jfg- You could have just imported your settings, ect. from one of the users on that partition during the setup of 1.7. I think this works just fine. Usually it just asks you if you want to import the settings from a different account, it should have done that during the install.

[jfg69]

Hey jfg- You could have just imported your settings, ect. from one of the users on that partition during the setup of 1.7. I think this works just fine. Usually it just asks you if you want to import the settings from a different account, it should have done that during the install.

It did ask, and I did put the info in. However... it DID not see my thunderbird info (I just copied the folder over so I could add my email accounts in with settings, emails, address books etc) In fact, when I went to update tb after installing it, it couldnt even find my install info across the partition even though that partition was mounted- no clue as to why.

The rest of the stuff is what is concerning me more.. added on programs (that install to /home) documents, photos and graphics stuff, my public share (which will eventually just go on its own partition) etc, etc..

[DaddyX3]

Hey jfg69, So, I need a little more insight to what has taken place with your latest install. Did you change around your partitions, re-arrange your disk from an old cluttered disk to a nicely organized one now? or did you keep the old setup on your disks with the partitions in the exact location on the disk and same sizes? Reason I ask, is
because of your statement:

In fact, when I went to update tb after installing it, it couldn't even find my install info across the partition even though that partition was mounted- no clue as to why.

This could be because when you just transferred all your folders from the old thunderbird to the new one, you didn't realize that it is in essence a map to the location of other files on your computer. In other words, Say your personal preferences for tb were originally setup in your /home partition which was located on sda6, now your new /home is located on sda4, then the references made by the settings folder for tb will be looking possibly on sda6, instead of sda4 (your new /home). Am I making any sense? Granted, one would think that /home is "/home" and it shouldn't matter where on the disk it is located, but I don't know if this is true or not. I don't know if this is really what is happening, but I feel that if you have changed your disk around (locations of the partitions and size) that you will have some issues with everything being able to find what it is supposed to in order for it to run correctly. I can only imagine that idexing of your hard drive has something to do with this issue. There has to be some sort of cache that is written into you tb folder that is telling it to look somewhere that no longer exists.

[jfg69]

OK, lets see if I can 'splain it to you...

I made NO changes to the disk for that install. All I did was install 1.7 on a previously made partition that was actually put there for this purpose.
Upon installing, I did NOT specify that I wanted my current /home to be mounted as /home for this installation, mostly cuz I wasnt sure what was going to happen to it and I didnt have the space to back it up prior to installing.

Ultimate Edition asked me which accounts to import settings from, but only had FireFox info, nothing for thunderbird. Apparently, the installer doesnt know to look (or maybe WHERE to look?) for tb info. BUT! it does ask about evolution if I recall... which I have no desire to use.
Upon rebooting, all was well- whatever settings I had for FF were intact, with the exception of a couple of items, dont remember which tho- minor stuff.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... I now have a new install with its own /home on the same partition (as opposed to the sep. /home I had for 1.6) I guess I could have just changed the name of it and called it media or something and used the newly installed /home, but not what I wanted to do....
So... I decided to install 1.7 again on some free space on my other drive... I had 16GB of unallocated space, converted it to EXT3.. specified it as /root and then specified the /home partition to be mounted as /home for this install.

I booted, prayed to TheMahn himself and watched as my new install booted up, with my former 1.6 desktop wallpaper, programs I had installed and all my FF extensions etc... it was a beautiful thing and jfg69 is a happy camper once again...for the most part.

TB was still not found, so I had to re-install it yet again... and will have to change the location of the backup to the /home so as to have some consistency between upgrades, although.. I think that this may not work for the next one if its going to be HH as opposed to GG.

OK, so how'd I do?

[DaddyX3]

Sounds like your happy, so ..... I guess you did a pretty good job . This is all that matters after all, and it sounds as though you did everything you set out to do originally and it all worked out for you, so, that's a good thing Believe me, I understand the difficulty in shifting things around and saving the important stuff with a lack of disk space and disks in general. Specially backups and media. I've had to dump a good 150GiB worth of my stuff a long time ago when making the transition from VISTA to Ultimate Edition. No fault of Ultimate Edition, but rather a dynamic disk raid 0 that was not going to be recognized by Ultimate Edition no matter what So, I know the game and you did fine