Moving the home directory to a new drive

I have no more space left on my hard-drive. So I bought a new one and I would like this hard-drive to be the home folder.

I thought of copying all the stuff I have on the home folder to the hard-drive partition. and creating a symbolic-link from ~ to there.

The problem I have is that I can't really delete the home folder while I'm logged in as the current user.

Is there a way to log out, and log in as root in Linux Mint?

I want to be able to do this without a live-CD solution.

Mellowcandle

Posted 2012-11-12T21:59:50.220

Reputation: 189

While it may seem like there are a few ways to do this to those who've used Linux for a while, new people may not know a way. 12 months and mine was the first up vote on the Q. – BeowulfNode42 – 2014-04-19T06:24:36.740

Also you may want to consider mounting the entire /home folder on the other drive instead of just /home/username. – BeowulfNode42 – 2014-04-19T06:28:27.997

Answers

if you really want to do it without using a liveCD, you either need to create a new user and login as them to perform the change, or you can enable your root account and use it to make the change. enabling root is not recommended on Mint.

sudo passwd

then to relock the root account:

sudo passwd root -l

Frank Thomas

Posted 2012-11-12T21:59:50.220

Reputation: 29 039

You could just mount the new drive as your home directory (e.g at /home/mellowcandle). You'd first have to copy the existing contents elsewhere and, as you suggest, this would be better done when logged in as another user (then su to root).

Alternatively, mount your new drive at /home2 say and then use vipw or usermod to change the home directory for your username - you don't need to make a softlink.

RedGrittyBrick

Posted 2012-11-12T21:59:50.220

Reputation: 70 632