How to install /home and swap to dedicated partitions

From Freespire

What is this for?

As of January 2008, Freespire 2.0.8 does not give the option to mount your “/home” onto a dedicated partition; it just installs everything on the same partition. Mounting your personal (user's) files on a dedicated partition is always a good idea for security purposes, in case of a crash or other problem yielding to an unusable OS partition. If your user's files are located in another partition, you might have lost your OS, but not your personal files!

Therefore, the following method gives steps to mount your “/home” (and linux-swap if you want) onto a dedicated partition (not sure it works if you mount on another disk, though).

Assumptions:

1-The partition onto which you want to mount /home is named "sda6";

2-You are starting from scratch and partitioning disk before installing Freespire (it works also if you already have your partitions with data in it);

3-User name at Installation is "USERN".

Steps:

1.Run FS from CD and click on option 3 at CD's boot up (safe grafx mode);

2.Once in desktop mode, load Gnome Partition Editor in RUN PROGRAMS/SYSTEM;

3.Create a "set disklabel" from the Device menu, use default MSDOS labeltype. Allocate your partitions like you want (maybe they are already, if yes skip to 4., otherwise add a primary, extended, logicals, format with appropriate file systems, etc.);

4.Note the name of the partition you want /home to be installed onto (see my assumption 1) and Reboot from CD again;

5.Choose option 1 to Install FS on HD;

6.Select ADVANCED INSTALL;

7.Choose your partition onto which you want to install FS (partition must be about 4Gb+ and have a “Yes” under the column Usable) and make sure you right-click the file system column to change it or re-select the one that is there, otherwise FS will format to default ReiserFS3;

8.Let it install (with or without a swap file, depending what you want. If you want a swap on a dedicated partition, choose no swap file);

9.Go in Desktop mode under USERN;

10.Run KUser;

11.Follow Creating_a_Root_Login_Account to setup ROOT as a log-on user at Desktop for later changes and WRITE DOWN on paper your own (username = USERN) checkboxes in the Groups' tab;

12.Open a Root Shell;

13.Type ls /sbin/jiffy* (there should be a file named JIFFYMOUNT);

14.Type cd /sbin then sudo mv jiffymount jiffymount-DONT-RUN

15.Open the fstab file for editing by entering sudo kwrite /etc/fstab

16.-

17.-

18.Edit the line where you see something very close to this "UUID=7b44f263-c376-4c22-9ba6-bef8f879a836 /mnt/sda6" (assumption 1) and replace "/mnt/sda6" with "/home" (if you want your swap file to have a dedicated partition, FS 2.0.8 already mounts it in the right place by default, assuming you have a linux-swap file system formatted partition somewhere);

19.Save file and exit KWrite (if saving does not work, do a Save As fstab1, delete the fstab and rename fstab1 to fstab or open it in KWrite and do another Save As this time for fstab);

20.Reboot;

21.Log on with ROOT username using the PW you selected in KUser earlier;

22.Open KUser and Delete your other user by selecting all checkboxes. Don’t worry about the 2-3 errors you might get, just click OK and delete on all. This deletes your USERN user, because it needs to be either deleted and re-created or modified so that his/her /home is on the other partition. I chose to re-create;

23.Now Add a user with same Groups as USERN before deletion (your paper!!) and assign PW like you did with ROOT (this re-creates your USERN user with the new /home location);

24.Reboot FS;

25.Log on as your new user (if you get a kstartup error at this point, re-do steps 21+), open Gparted, look in the column MOUNTPOINT and /home should be assigned to the sda6 partition.

To make sure your swap is assigned to your dedicated linux-swap partition (if you have one), open a root shell, type dmesg | grep swap and the UUID should correspond to your partition’s UUID, plus the number of bytes should also match the dedicated partition’s total bytes. Try also the command free and see again the assignments.

Yes, there are other ways and certainly faster ways to make all this work, but this one lowers the command line entries and is well suited for people who don’t know much how to work around with command lines. These steps should guide you to your solution, no matter what.

In case of a problem, post your issue on the FS Forums[1]!