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I just installed a second hard drive. Previously my partition scheme was /dev/sda1 contained the boot files, and /dev/sda2 contained everything else. Now /dev/sda is the new hard drive, and /dev/sdb is the old hard drive. I want to use /dev/sda as my /home partition. So, I created the GPT partition table in /dev/sda with gdisk (single partition), then I formatted /dev/sda1 with mkfs.ext4, and then I added /dev/sda1 to my fstab as /home, ext4, "defaults", 0, and 2. I rebooted. I should have rebooted at this point, but I did something stupid and mved my only user folder, mszegedy, to /. I then mounted /dev/sda1 in /home, and mved mszegedy back to /home. I then rebooted, to find that /home/mszegedy did not exist. I went looking for it, but I couldn't find any of my files or any folder with the name "mszegedy", so I concluded that I had deleted it. /dev/sda1 was mounted in /home. I tried unmounting /dev/sda1 and remounting it, but the result was the same.

The interesting part is when I tried to useradd -m mszegedy, no directory named "mszegedy" appeared in /home, and when I tried it again, it said that I already existed. Rebooting turned out the same result. What's going on?

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  • If I've followed your narration correctly, then /home/mszegedy should exist. Are you absolutely sure you didn't misremember one of the steps? What is the output of df now, and of fdisk -l? If you run mount --bind / /mnt; ls /mnt/home, what do you see?
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 0:23

2 Answers 2

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I'm not sure how to even help you at this point. I would make sure that the contents of the drives are understood first.

For example I would go with something like this:

  1. Run the command blkid and see what partitions show up there.

  2. Mount each partition in tun under the directory /mnt, (mount /dev/sda2 /mnt) or something equivalent.

  3. Once mounted, confirm the contents of the partition (is it old /home, is it something else).

  4. umount it (umount /mnt).
  5. Repeat for each partition.

Hopefully this will shed some light on what's going on.

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Uncommenting the line for /dev/sda1 in fstab did the trick. Apparently /home/mszegedy was being stored on /dev/sdb2, and when I mounted /dev/sda1, it made it completely invisible. I'll try to move it to /dev/sda1 some other way, then.

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