Can I use existing /home for new persistence?

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dolo724
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Joined: Thu Feb 18, 2016 4:28 pm

Can I use existing /home for new persistence?

#1 Post by dolo724 »

I have an existing /home partition I would like to use with a live-usb installation. I have more data there than the usb could ever hold, and don't want to lose anything. I tried using the original system files in their own partition, but somehow can't get that to work. That's another topic, for now I'm just interested in getting /dev/sda3 as my /home.

thanks

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fehlix
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Joined: Wed Apr 11, 2018 5:09 pm

Re: Can I use existing /home for new persistence?

#2 Post by fehlix »

dolo724 wrote: Sun Nov 18, 2018 4:36 pm I have an existing /home partition I would like to use with a live-usb installation. I have more data there than the usb could ever hold, and don't want to lose anything. I tried using the original system files in their own partition, but somehow can't get that to work. That's another topic, for now I'm just interested in getting /dev/sda3 as my /home.
Is this about a normal installation on hd, or are you talkin about a LiveUSB with persistence, or even about a frugal "Live" install with persistence.
I could certainly somehow guess, but I'm not absolutly clear what you are describing above.
Please re-formuate more clearly what you have and what you are going to achieve.
Might be it's just a simple new installation with existing home? Which is doable with the MX installer.
Gigabyte Z77M-D3H, Intel Xeon E3-1240 V2 (Quad core), 32GB RAM,
GeForce GTX 770, Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB, Seagate Barracuda 4TB

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Adrian
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Joined: Wed Jul 12, 2006 1:42 am

Re: Can I use existing /home for new persistence?

#3 Post by Adrian »

I would just mount /dev/sda3 as a /mnt/data and then link it somewhere in /home with something like ~/data or (or mount it directly /home/demo/data -- demo is the username used in live usb) I would not mess with the name of the default user when I use persistency because many scripts rely on /home/demo for some logic and you don't know what you can screw up if you rename the user.

EDIT: as fehlix mentioned, it's not really clear what set up you have in mind.

dolo724
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Feb 18, 2016 4:28 pm

Re: Can I use existing /home for new persistence?

#4 Post by dolo724 »

fehlix wrote: Sun Nov 18, 2018 5:01 pm Is this about a normal installation on hd, or are you talkin about a LiveUSB with persistence, or even about a frugal "Live" install with persistence.
...Might be it's just a simple new installation with existing home? Which is doable with the MX installer.
I had a good installation with MX-17 (sda1 /, sda3 /home), but I made a rookie mistake and borked the / partition. Until I get enough shekels for a new one, the drive still works as a data disk, and I have a 16G usb stick with LiveUSB installed. So I can mount the drive manually and access my stuff, it's just wicked inconvenient.

The big reason I can't redo with a fresh install is the original partition table didn't match the logical boundaries. I tried to reinstall once and it still failed. Yes, a bad hdd, but as I said it's okay for data.

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