changing /home directory to another partition

[fingers99]

Still having these problems? Do you get error messages when you edit /etc/fstab?

-- Ed

Mr. Ed,

I can get around the editing problem of the FSTAB file. My problem is ... when I reboot, knoppix REBUILDS the file removing my changes. This is a PIA!

Radnor

I found myself having these problem in a HD install of 3.6 until I put my entry before the "made by knoppix" line:

like this:

# /etc/fstab: filesystem table.
#
# filesystem mountpoint type options dump pass
/dev/hdc1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /floppy vfat defaults,user,noauto,showexec,umask=022 0 0
usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /cdrom iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noexec,noauto 0 0
/dev/dvd /dvd iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noexec,noauto 0 0
/dev/cdaudio /cdaudio iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noexec,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdc3 /home ext3 auto,exec 0 0
/dev/hda /mnt/mp3 ext3 auto 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hdc2 none swap defaults 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hdd1 /mnt/hdd1 ext2 noauto,users,exec 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hdd2 none swap defaults 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hdd3 /mnt/hdd3 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0

If you're going to do this and a "mount -a" you need to # out the entry made by Knoppix.

My understanding is that the /etc/fstab entries will be re-written by Knoppix if it doesn't find an entry before the # Added by KNOPPIX.

[jmort]

This is just a thought, but would saving your configuration possibly save changes to the fstab file. I have seemed to have success by editing my fstab onn a PMI install so that I could make my hda2 partition vfat wriiteable on bootup. I'm not sure whether it was from saving my confiiguration or because the persisitent home is located on that partition. In either case, that is something we might try (saving the configuration files, that is).

James

To save config files, you click on the penguin in the taskbar, then I think its 'CONFIIGURE' and there should be a save entry.

[mr_ed]

The process spelled out by Rumo is what Kyle Rankin describes in his book Knoppix Hacks and how I share /home between various Linuxes and BSDs. (For adding distros after the first, though, you only copy over what's new so that you don't clobber what's already there.)

As McGyver points out, you can boot straight into your installation as root so long as you haven't changed root's home directory to /home. Be sure not to su or sudo into root, though, because then you'll still be in /home.

Knoppix in fact rebuilds /etc/fstab on every boot - you can see this in /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig and in the blue and yellow message it generates at boot time saying, "Scanning for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab..."

Klaus Knopper designed Knoppix to be a replacement for a laptop - he wanted a portable work environment that he could run wherever he was, just by sticking a CD into whatever computer was nearby.

From that point of view, rebuilding /etc/fstab each time is absolutely necessary. Once Knoppix is installed to a hard drive, though, it becomes more of a bug than a feature.

To disable it, you can include the boot parameter (cheatcode) nofstab along with lang=us or vga=791 or whatever else you use at startup.

-- Ed

[radnor]

moved to it's own question ...