Re: [tlug] Regaining System Sanity [SOLVED]

[Dave M G <martin@example.com>]

Stephen, Keith,

Thank you for the advice, especially about warning me away from a 
separate GRUB partition. I'm glad I checked and saved myself some hassles.

I'm happy to report that since I last posted, I've accomplished the 
following:

1. Shrunk down and moved my original partition to make way for a new 
installation.

2. Created two new partitions, one for system and one for my home directory.

3. Made a fresh install of Ubuntu.

4. Edited my fstab file so that my new "home" partition mounts as my 
"home" directory.

5. Copied the data I wanted to keep from my old home directory into my new.

And presto, I'm good as new. I'm able to write email here now because I 
simply copied my .mozilla-thunderbird over from my old installation, and 
here I have all my account settings, folders, filters and everything.

It was all a very painless process, actually. As you guys suggested, I 
made sure to plan my steps out in advance before doing anything, so I 
could walk through it with confidence.

It took a lot of time, especially the repartitioning step. But I just 
left Gnome Partition Editor to do it's thing while I went out for coffee 
in the afternoon. And then I came back, set Ubuntu to install and went 
out to a friend's sayonara party in the evening.

The only hiccup in the whole procedure was at the end when I replaced 
the default "home" directory with the "home" partition. I was following 
the instructions here:
http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/01/29/move-home-to-its-own-partition/
... When I rebooted, it wouldn't let me log in because I hadn't set the 
permissions correctly on my "dave" directory.

Fortunately, the error message was pretty descriptive, and I solved it 
by getting to a command prompt, going to /home directory and typing:
sudo chown -Rh dave:dave dave

Which, by the way, I was able to figure out by typing in "chown --help".

Let's see... oh, I also took my old xorg.conf file from my previous 
install and simply over wrote the new one. And with that one stroke, my 
Nvidia card was giving me dual monitor support and Wacom tablet settings 
I like. (I'm tell you all this, by the way, so I have my own reference 
in the TLUG archives.)

That's about it, I guess. Overall, very painless.

Oh, and one nice bonus. Although I didn't really need or intend it, the 
installer detected my previous Ubuntu installation on my old partition, 
and set up GRUB so I can boot to it if I want to. So that's a nice back up.

And the main thing is: early indications are that my system is way, way 
more stable. My bluetooth dongle seems responsive, my USB devices are so 
far so good...

Okay, now I'm going to get back to tackling some of the issues I was 
having before, and see if solutions are a little easier to come by in a 
gremlin free environment.

Thanks, as always, to TLUG and all it's members for helping me through 
yet another self imposed set of disasters.

--
Dave M G
Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn
Kernel 2.6.20-14-generic
Pentium D Dual Core Processor