Hard Drive Crash - but had /home on another!

[lizardking]

Unfourtunate, I had a boot hard drive failure (I think a head crash, no bother)

Being a relative noob, I though it fairly smart of me to have the all the users /home on a seperate drive, thus I was anticipating no problems.

I get another drive, re-install Mandriva 2006 onto it and get ready to mount /home.

Here is the problem....How do I get the old user /home to be recognized by the new installation? I have lost the /etc/password file. I have tried to assign users the same name as before and copy the data over to the new drive partition but KDE will not start, (.DCOP and other issues, I think it may be UserID numbers) I've tried to just mount the /home partition, same KDE start problems.
I've googled a little and most of the How-To stuff describes migration of the system, I trashed a system and have a new one installed and just want to use the existing /home files and ID's.

Anyone willing to point me in the right direction?

Thanx in advance!

[devils casper]

hi lizardking !

did you add entry for /home partition in /etc/fstab file?






Casper

[lizardking]

Howdy devils_casper!

Thanks for the quick reply...Yes, The /etc/fstab (when updated) holds the /home at hdb1. But when this is true, all users (except root) cannot start kde. When booting failsafe, /home appears mounted correctly. If I 'undo' the /hdb1 mount, then only the users that I created during the second install can log-in and run kde.

I've tried copying the data from /hdb1 onto the /home directory that was created with the second install (onto hda1) but this doesn't seem to work.....

I know I could just copy the data files over and get everyone to reset passwords, but this would tend to be a very loose security set-up if I had say, 50 users.

Any other thoughts?

(edited because of my terible speling)

[devils casper]

simply copying files wont work. you have to preserve permissions and symlinks.
copy home folder of one user in new partition and check if it works.
create a home folder of any user in new /home partition.
cd to /home/<username> folder ( existing home folder )

find . -depth -print0 | cpio --null --sparse -pvd /<home_partition>/<user_home_folder>

Casper

[lizardking]

WooooHoooo!!!!!

Thanks a whole bunch devils_casper!

That worked perfectly, the family is very happy!

Banana's for you!



I am humbled by your answer and will strive to learn!

[devils casper]

i am glad i could help you. thanx for bananas !






Casper