How to get a reinstall of Ubuntu to recognize /home partition?

Question

I have been running Ubuntu 9.04 since it's release and on my last install adventure I took the plunge and created a seperate partition for my /home directory. For reasons not important here I needed to reinstall Ubuntu. So I went through the motions and selected the root partition to be deleted and used as the install point and not thinking I needed to do anything else I went forward with the install.

After getting up and running I installed and ran gparted and see that my partition I had previously setup for /home isn't mounted, and doesn't have a mount point defined so I guess I just set up my root to have /home included.

Can I fix this without reinstalling?

Answer 1

I'm guessing you know the name of your partition from gparted. (lets use /dev/sda3 for this example)

All you need to do is edit your fstab and add and entry this partition to have it mount as /home: (make a backup of the fstab first)

$ sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak
$ sudo gedit /etc fstab

Add a line:

/dev/sda3 /home ext3 defaults 0 2

A reboot should bring this drive up at the /home mount like you are looking for. If the UIDs of your user on the original installation and new installation are different you may encounter isses... but that is for another question.

Answer 2

would it be possible to mount that partition and use /home as the mount point?

Edit: i'm not sure about this though. i have no real way of trying it.