can't login

[kurianthayil]

Hi
I am using Fedora 8 on my Acer Laptop. After the installation I created a partition and mounted it as /home. Before doing this I copied the user home directory to another location (/mnt). I mounted the new partition (to /home), included it in /etc/fstab and then copied the user's home directory back to /home. Now when I login, it allows me in command line (tty1,...6) but not in GUI. Any idea what went wrong?? I then created some new users and then tried to login but that was of no use. I made the settings back to original - copied user's home directory to /mnt, unmounted new partition and then copied user's home directory to /home. Still it doesn't work. Any idea why its happening?

Regards,
Kurian.

[smolloy]

I'm not sure that you used the correct procedure to move /home to a new partition. It sounds like you did the whole swap while logged, and that could create some interesting problems -- e.g. KDE/Gnome writing to hidden files on each partition while you're swapping them.

The correct method would have been to mount the new partition to /mnt/newhome, and then...

cp -pr /home/* /mnt/newhome/

Then edit fstab, and, then reboot.

An even better method would have been to do everything through a liveCD, and then you have no worries about the OS trying to write to the partitions you're moving around.


EDIT: My first method has the problem that you never get rid of the previous contents of /home, which just sit around taking up space until you get rid of them with a liveCD. I really do advice using a liveCD as a much safer method.