moving home directory to an alternate partition

Question

I'm running ubuntu in VMWare fusion and I want to move my home directory onto an alternate partition within the VM. (I'm going to set up symlinks to actually access it)

I have most of this taken care of, but when I try to remove the original files, I keep getting an error saying that /home/user/.gvfs/ is in use and I can't get rid of it.

How do I tell tell what is locking this directory and disable it long enough to set up the symlinks?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Answer 1

I think you need to

• boot to a live cd,
• mount the new /home to a temp location,
• copy & remove the current /home files
• edit fstab to mount the new device as /home,
• then boot to the OS

to complete this.

Answer 2

/home/user/.gvfs/ is used by gvfsd as mount point for its virtual file system if the user has an active Gnome session. You need to close your Gnome session to remove it.