For the past week, I’ve been trying to switch my /home partition from my 500GB nvme to my 1TB sata ssd. I’ve been asking and receiving help from people in my previous post, but I keep hitting wall after wall in making it work and I seem to be missing a step.
Big thank you to @[email protected], @[email protected], for replying to my comments and helping me along.
Previous post:
I finally installed Linux, but I’m having a mixed experience
Context:
OS: Fedora Linux 39 (KDE Plasma) x86_64
Kernel: 6.5.6-300.fc39.x86_64
DE: Plasma 5.27.8
WM: Kwin
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
GPU: Nvidia Geforce GTX 1660
I have a 500GB nvme which I want to have my entire / stored within. And I have a 1TB sata ssd which I want to have my /home to be stored in. I’ve tried many of the steps some helpful people here on lemmy have detailed, and though it’s gotten me closer to getting it right, but I still can’t seem to login when I switch my fstab.
Allow me to go through every step I’ve done so far.
I reinstalled fedora, hoping I could separate my /home in the installer. No such luck, anytime I switched my /home partition into the 1TB drive my entire root directory would follow it. I decided to do the auto install on my nvme and do it manually when it’s fully installed.
So just to be clear I am starting from a clean install nothing except neofetch and vim installed.
I created two new directories directly in /. They were /new_home and /old_home.
I formatted my 1TB disk, partitioned it, and then formatted the partition into an ext4, 931.5 G partition.
I mounted it to /new_home
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda
└─sda1 ext4 1.0 f56df020-2420-4b0c-af4d-2c4c6a56a0b0 718.4G 16% /new_home
From here I ran the command
sudo rsync -a /home/adelie/new_home. this is why the current available space is 718.4G. I also added a new file to /new_home called confirm.txt in order to tell which was which at a glance.
I check the permissions and ownership of both /home and /new_home with ls -la they were identical.
adelie@localhost-live:/new_home$ ls -la /new_home
total 8
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 4096 Feb 27 11:06 .
dr-xr-xr-x. 1 root root 204 Feb 25 21:13 ..
drwx------. 15 adelie adelie 4096 Feb 27 11:11 adelie
adelie@localhost-live:/new_home$ ls -la /home
total 0
drwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 12 Feb 25 21:01 .
dr-xr-xr-x. 1 root root 204 Feb 25 21:13 ..
drwx------. 1 adelie adelie 348 Feb 27 11:25 adelie
adelie@localhost-live:/new_home$
The story is the same inside the $USER files, the files and directories are identical and so are there permissions and ownership.
I added /dev/sda1 to fstab to auto boot both drives.
UUID=d5877671-6a39-4d96-9a2a-514b6007a59b / btrfs subvol=root,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=ed92de40-2403-4365-9b5c-eb10d519757c /boot ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=02E9-123A /boot/efi vfat umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 2
UUID=d5877671-6a39-4d96-9a2a-514b6007a59b /home btrfs subvol=home,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=f56df020-2420-4b0c-af4d-2c4c6a56a0b0 /new_home ext4 defaults 1 2
At this point I haven’t changed the boot path for /home yet. When I rebooted, everything worked as expected. When I entered the KDE login screen it let me go into my desktop when I inputted my password correctly.
After this I decided to swap them.
UUID=d5877671-6a39-4d96-9a2a-514b6007a59b / btrfs subvol=root,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=ed92de40-2403-4365-9b5c-eb10d519757c /boot ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=02E9-123A /boot/efi vfat umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 2
UUID=d5877671-6a39-4d96-9a2a-514b6007a59b /old_home btrfs subvol=home,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=f56df020-2420-4b0c-af4d-2c4c6a56a0b0 /home ext4 defaults 1 2
When I entered into the KDE login screen, anytime I inputted my password correctly it would kick me back to the login screen within the second. At this point I assumed it was a KDE issue and that I was missing a step in order to login correctly.
I read a comment explaining TTY, and that I should try logging in from there to confirm if it was a KDE issue or not. When I tried it I ended up with this.
Fedora Linux 39 (KDE Plasma)
Kernel 6.5.6-300.fc39.x86_64 on an x86_64 (tty3)
Localhost-live login: adelie
Password:
Last login: Tue Feb 27 xx:xx:xx on tty3
-- adelie: /home/adelie: change directory failed: Permission denied
Logging in with home = "/".
From my root account I checked /home and /old_home, and /home contained confirm.txt, meaning that everything mounted properly, I then changed the fstab back to what is was originally.
This is where I’m at now.
I’m totally lost on what step I missed. I’d like to get this working in order to actually be able to use my computer, as I am committed to changing my /home directory before making any major changes or installs. If anybody has any idea on what I missed please feel free to pitch in.
*Update: The issue was SELinux. My SELinux contexts were bad and were denying me access to my own data. I reset the context with this command,
restorecon -Rv /home/
I’d like to give a big thanks to,
/u/[email protected]; for pointing out SELinux as a possible issue.
/u/[email protected]; for providing the command to fix this issue.
/u/[email protected]; for being so patient with me, and helping me go through the list of possible issues.
Fedora Linux also comes with SELinux enabled by default. Did you check that the new home folder and all its contents have the proper SELinux tags?
Run an
ls -lZand check that the directory has theuser_home_ttag,The user’s home directory is also stored in the /etc/passwd file. Did you update the entry there?
No, do not “disable SELinux”. That advice hasn’t been valid for a good 20 years. You can set it to permissive though, to see if it’s the source of the problem.
ok here’s the output
root@localhost-live:/home/adelie# ls -lZ total 36 -rw-r--r--. 1 adelie adelie unconfined_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 0 Feb 27 11:11 confirm.txt drwxr-xr-x. 2 adelie adelie unconfined_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 4096 Feb 25 21:03 Desktop drwxr-xr-x. 2 adelie adelie unconfined_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 4096 Feb 27 19:32 Documents drwxr-xr-x. 2 adelie adelie unconfined_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 4096 Feb 27 10:59 Downloads drwxr-xr-x. 5 adelie adelie unconfined_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 4096 Feb 26 14:15 Essentials drwxr-xr-x. 2 adelie adelie unconfined_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 4096 Feb 27 10:59 Music drwxr-xr-x. 3 adelie adelie unconfined_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 4096 Feb 27 11:00 Pictures drwxr-xr-x. 2 adelie adelie unconfined_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 4096 Feb 27 11:00 Public drwxr-xr-x. 2 adelie adelie unconfined_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 4096 Feb 27 11:00 Templates drwxr-xr-x. 2 adelie adelie unconfined_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 4096 Feb 27 11:00 VideosHere’s your issue. Your selinux contexts are bad so you’re probably being denied access to your own data. To reset the contexts back to normal you can use the restorecon command:
The -R tells it to go through the specified path recursively, the v tells it to be verbose in the output and show you what it’s doing.
IT FUCKING WORKED
THANK YOU
Awesome! Enjoy!
It’s probably
ls -lZd . ..you’d want there instead, but I don’t know selinux.But yeah, damn, it never would’ve occurred to me that you had that installed without knowing it. Glad to have a possible explanation.
I didn’t realize I had it either, I’ll see what I can do to fix it tomorrow because right now, I’m tired and hungry.
BTW, thank you for your help. Your comments and explanations have been a great in helping me understand my issue and Linux in general.
Great catch!