Unable to log in after creating a new /home partition

If …

  • the contents of the /home directory was resident on the root disk,       and

  • you needed to migrate that data onto the separate partition being mounted as /home,

then …

  • you need to boot to live ISO session,
  • mount the original root to path ${originalRoot}
  • rename ${originalRoot}/home to ${originalRoot}/home.ORIG
  • mkdir ${newHomeDir}
  • mount the ${originalRoot}/home to ${newHomeDir} (on that second partition)
  • ( cd ${originalRoot}/home.ORIG ; tar cf - . ) | ( cd ${newHomeDir} ; tar xvpf - )

That will migrate the data to that proper /home partition.



However, there will be a race condition during boot! You need to specify that the /home partition must be confirmed as mounted before proceeding with starting the Desktop Manager.

In my case, that was done by setting a systemd wants specification, per the following for my own setup.


File: system/lightdm.service.d/override.conf

[Unit]
RequiresMountsFor=/DB001_F2

File: system/sysinit.target.d/override.conf

[Unit]
RequiresMountsFor=/DB001_F2

Also, in my case, I’ve kept the actual root of my ${HOME} on the root partition, but symlink all non-${HOME} content to that secondary drive, per the following:

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