[plug] /home directory?? help please

[Jeremy Malcolm]

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> What I propose to do is make a new partition on one of my hard
drives and
> set it up as  
> 
> /home
> 
> I plan to reserve about 100Mb for it. If I do that, will the system
> automatically move all of my personal setting to this partition or
will I
> have to do that manually?

Manually.  First create the partition (using fdisk or your preferred
tool) and build a filesystem (using mkfs or your preferred tool). 
Then mount it at a temporary mount point, like /mnt/temp (you'll have
to mkdir /mnt/temp first - or just use /mnt if it's empty).  Then edit
/etc/fstab to include a line for your new partition, something similar
to:

  /dev/hda2   /home   ext2   defaults   0   2

although your mileage will vary.  Then do the following:

  cp -a /home /mnt/temp
  umount /dev/hda2
  mv /home /home.old ; mkdir /home ; mount -t ext2 /dev/hda2 /home

The first line will copy all your files over, the second line will
unmount your new partition from /mnt/temp, the third line will
(quickly! - that is the key) move your old home directory to a backup,
create a new empty home directory as a mount point, and mount the new
partition on it.  If everything works, you can "rm -r /home.old".

Hope this helps.

- -- 
JEREMY MALCOLM Jeremy at Malcolm.wattle.id.au http://malcolm.wattle.id.au
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