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Tom
Asked: 2011-10-27 16:27:16 +0800 CST

I upgraded to 11.10 but my home partition is missing, how can I recover it?

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When I installed Ubuntu 11.04, I created a separate home partition. I have just installed Ubuntu 11.10. In the installation screen The options were:

  1. Erase Ubuntu 11.04 and reinstall
  2. Upgrade Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10
  3. Erase everything and reinstall
  4. Something else

I chose the option called "Erase Ubuntu 11.04 and reinstall".

Now that installation has finished, I have logged in but everything is fresh, my home partition was ignored or not recognized. So Opps... I must have choosen the wrong installation type from the menu - Doh!

Luckily, there is a glimmer of hope because I can see the old home partition in nautilus complete with my old home data and i can see the partition in sudo fdisk -l.

How can I recover my old home partition so that the new 11.10 uses it and everything is back to normal?

Should I re-install but choose a different option? Or is there some command line fu I can use to get me back up and running?

11.10

1 Answers

  1. Aha, I found the answer here: /home partition not recognized

    Cut & paste for convenience:

    To restore your /home do this:

    Note This will mount over your current /home if it exists. To fix this enter a terminal and sudo umount /home this will display the root partition /home directory contents which you can then move to a temporary location. Reboot or remount your home partition and move the data into /home again

    1. Execute in a terminal:

      sudo blkid

      And note down the UUID and TYPE of the partition containing your old /home (you can get more info executing sudo fdisk -l)

    2. Execute:

      gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

      and add a new line at the end with the following syntax:

      UUID={UUID} /home {TYPE} defaults 0 2

      Replacing {UUID} and {TYPE} with the respective data.

      **Be sure that there is no other line with the mount point /home, or they will conflict (if there is, comment it out using #)*

    3. Reboot

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