• SupportQuestion

  • Creating a dedicated /home partition on secondary storage devices

Hi, Can someone run me through the process of setting a dedicated /home partition to your SSD on Solus. I want to have my work and personal files go to a partition I created on my SSD. Im using a 1TB SSD under the path "/dev/sda1" with file system type set as ext4. my storage is mounted under /run/media.
I'm a newbie to Solus and recently transitioned from Linux Mint as I wanted a OS that has a rolling release model and I also like the overall look and feel of Solus. Long story short I ended losing a lot of data while trying to transition.
Currently I cant execute or write anything to my storage drives because of something to do with permissions to allow for reading and writing and stuff, and don't want to end up screwing something up so I just left it as it is.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

So you have 1 drive with boot-/-/home which should equal /sda1 = boot , /sda2 = / , /sda3 = /home
If setup from install then your /home will be mounted at /home with user permissions

You can use Disks to check drive partitions and mount points. Mounting at /media is usually for removable storage.

A fresh install will mount / in /etc/fstab showing /dev/sda2 UUID / ext4 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
and home on the NVME showing /dev/NVME UUID /home ext4 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 2

I would always suggest a fresh install. 😃

If just looking for permission changes use the command - chmod 777 or 775 or 774
owner 7 = read, write, execute
group 5 = read, execute
other 4 = read only

Don't use chmod 777, afaik it might cause some problems.

A better option would be to use the chown command to change the ownership of the /mnt/somethingSomething partition and make it belong to your user and group (which, in turn, will make your user have read / write / execute permissions in that partition that he owns).

It goes like this chown -R user:group /mnt/PathToThePartition

To find out your user name and group, use these commands whoami and groups - to respectively find out the user and the group. On my system the group is named the same as the user.

Eg, If your user was named Steven_Self, and your group was called Steven_Self, it'd be chown -R Steven_Self:Steven_Self /mnt/PathToThePartition

As to a separate home partition, it's possible to use it, but you'd need to reinstall the system to do it, I don't think there's a way to transfer an existing home directory to a new /home partition.

To do it in the installer, choose the manual partitioning option, create a separate partition for /home and give it the home flag (you can add the flag via GParted).

Just wanna share my experience with OP on secondary drives / separate home partition. Maybe others will differ but this was what I found.
I have 2 SSDs in my PC. At first, what I would do is just install on one drive, and after installing fstab my secondary drive to mount on boot (using gnome-disks). This proved to be unreliable as a bunch of apps kept giving me permissions errors, and if the drives weren't mounted in the proper order on boot sometimes things would fail to load. I experienced an error where I had to changed fstab gid/uuid settings to get any Steam proton games to launch at all. This happened when the drive was initially on NTFS (I have learned better) but it popped up again even after formatting to ext4. So I narrowed it down to it being a separate drive that just isn't getting mounted properly and Steam/other programs not being able to find it, or have the permissions to view it.
For a few months from then on, enticed by all the stories I've heard online, I was using my main partitions on the smaller SSD and dedicating /home to the bigger one. Long story short, while it is a method that seems to work and is supported by the Solus installer (just don't format), I wouldn't recommend separating any Linux install across more than one drive at all..I got so sick of the UUID and permissions related errors and my Steam library disappearing like every week. Furthermore, when installing Steam on a Linux system with a separate partition or library or a separate drive, it doesn't install Steam in the default local directory. Because of this Proton prefixes end up broken unless you handle everything locally. I ditched the idea of a separate home drive in favor of a small Windows install as a secondary OS because of all this, and just kept my larger SSD dedicated to Solus, on the default partition schemes. Smooth sailing with everything since.
I feel like the idea of a separate /home partition is useful, but not to be hopping around or constantly reinstalling on your daily driver OS. At least not if you know exactly where to point everything and you make sure each directory is correctly found. I've seen the warnings that mixing a new root install with an older (or another distro's) home partition can lead to convoluted configs and problems down the road, but I ignored them. I've had a much more stable experience since following that elusive stranger's advice and sticking to one drive per OS on their default partition schemes. Good luck friend

    @craigtoyoracer
    @Junglist
    Oh I see where you all are coming from. Thank you for the support.
    Correct me if I'm wrong; I guess from the looks of it, I can't really move my existing /home partition into the partition on the SSD without first doing a fresh install on my system. And from the fresh install, I could then manually choose to move the /home folder.. is that correct?
    I posted my disks specs on the screenshots above.. I forgot to mention that I have an NVME that I'm using as the main default partition where the root is and I assume the /home folder is as well.
    I want to follow what @Junglist said about the permissions issue.. but should I do that before doing the fresh install or is it best to do it after?
    The problem is... as it stands my SSD partition (/dev/sda1) is usually not permanently mounted, when it is mounted, it usually is set on /run/media path and then it gets unmounted every time I boot the computer.

      Steven_Self So your 128 GB disk is great. On fresh install choose custom and install with separate /home and just install to /dev/nvme - boot, swap and /
      after install edit fstab with
      sudo nano /etc/fstab
      then add UUID=4a7 ... (c/p .. I would use the whole drive for /home) /home ext4 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 2
      double check should look the same syntax as the 128 drive then save/exit ctrl-O ctrl-X
      then your /home is auto mounted and the os will not touch with updates. 🙂

      added howto https://linuxhint.com/write-edit-etc-fstab/

        Steven_Self If you do a reinstall, and during it create and use a separate /home partition, there's no need to mess with any ownership and file permissions of that /home partition. Afaik you always have read / write / execute access on your home partition.

        You'd only need to do it If you wanted to have read / write / execute permissions on a non-home 'external' partition.

          4 days later

          So just to give an update. I followed the advice and I did a fresh install and chose the option for custom partitions when I entered the installation menu. I assigned the NVME drive to hold the "/' "ESP" and "Swap" main partitions while assigning my SSD drive to hold the /home folder. Afterwards I restarted the computer and I checked where everything was mounted. Seems like I didnt have to change anything in fstab because as @Junglist mentioned, it was already there and didnt need to change further.
          I could get to move my personal and work files under the new /home path now without any problems concerning the permissions. Haven't tested out gaming yet so I can't really say for sure about the Steam experience, although I am glad I got to have larger storage space for all my relevant files.
          So I'm happy now 🙂 Thank you all for the support @craigtoyoracer @Junglist .