Lost my profile and other customization after adding new harddrives

alexmclin

I'm a relatively newish Linux user. I'm comfortable finding my around the system and doing research to figure out how to do stuff. But I just did something today that I want to understand what went wrong.

I recently installed a Fedora so I was playing around with it, I've set my desktop to be xfce and made some customization in my desktop background image, look, and preferred terminal colors and font. etc. Just mild getting settled in stuff.

I decided to add two hard drives and I also decided I'd mount one of the hard drive at /home and the second hard drive mounted at another point in my own directory, /home/alexander/codebase, the idea being that both hard drives would store my stuff and codebase stuff respectively.

After putting ext4 on both of the hard drives, I then moved my home directory under /home and all of its subdirectories onto one of the new hard drive, added entries to the fstab file to mount the hard drives on /home and /home/alexander/codebase.

I rebooted the system, logged in and everything's changed, it seems to have reverted back to the factory defaults.

I checked the fstab file and verified that my directories are there in their usual places, the new hard drives have been mounted so I thought the system should have automatically loaded my profile and presented me with my expected look and customization.

Clearly something's gone wrong and I'd like to figure out what happened.

Can you give me an idea of what I did wrong? Thanks!

Alex

Goineasy9

From what you told us, you seemed to do everything correctly, but, how did you move /home? When you copied the contents of /home, did you also copy the hidden directories? Those are the one that begin with a period. They are used fr many things, and, one of the things they are used for is to hold personal configuration files. For example, I use KDE and many of my personal KDE settings are in the .kde folder in my /home directory.

When you go into your File Manager, under View, click on the "Show Hidden Files" and you will see what I mean.

If by some chance you know about the hidden files, and I guessed wrong, let us know.

woboyle

What GoinEasy said makes a lot of sense. It is really easy to forget about those pesky hidden files and directories (with leading . (dot))... :rolleyes:

So, how exactly did you copy your home directory to the new file system?