How do I modify my "bind-home.conf" file in LL2 from a live CD?

[gold_finger]

Ok -- going to take things slow and one at a time.

First -- your bind-home.conf file looks fine; so no need to do anything more with that.

Second -- I'm sure that /etc/fstab does exist; you just couldn't find it by navigating with file manager for some reason.  So, from your output I can see which partition it will be on and can give directions for opening the file with a terminal.  Will get to that soon.

Third -- as more of a "house cleaning" type of thing, I want you to change the "label" of that DATA partition.  We'll do that first, then fix the fstab file -- which is probably the source of the boot problem.


All instructions below are assuming that you have booted using a live LL CD (not from the installed system).

Right now your "label" for the DATA partition is "/mnt/DATA".  That's the correct mount point, but you really shouldn't use that as the label for the partition.  I could be wrong, but think it's not a good idea to have characters like "/" in the label names for partitions.  (I vaguely remember reading that it's best to just have letters, numbers, no special characters and ideally no spaces.  So just to be sure no future problems arise, lets change the label name for the partition.)

Open GParted and right-click on the /dev/sda3 partition.  Choose "Label".  In dialog box, change the label from "/mnt/DATA" to just "DATA", then click "OK".  Then apply the change by Edit -> Apply All Operations.  No data loss will occur by just changing the label.  Go ahead and close GParted after that.

Now, let's just confirm that your DATA partition has the folders in it already that you are trying to bind to your Home directory.  Open a terminal and follow instructions below:

Mount the DATA partition to live environment

Code:

sudo mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

Now list the contents of that DATA partition

Code:

ls -l /mnt

You should see your folders Documents, Music, Pictures, etc. listed in the output.  Hopefully, they will also show as being owned by your username instead of root.  If you don't see them listed, or they are listed but show up as owned by root, report back the output of that ls -l command.

Unmount the DATA partition now

Code:

sudo umount /mnt

Time to look at and fix (if necessary) the fstab file.  Mount the root partition to the live environment.

Code:

sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt

First, let's confirm that you made the mount point of "/mnt/DATA" in your installed system

Code:

ls /mnt/mnt

You should see "DATA" listed in the output.  If you don't, that means you forgot to make the mount point.  Stop and report back if that is the case.

Assuming that "DATA" does exist, let's now open your fstab file and check the contents.

Code:

gksu leafpad /mnt/etc/fstab

It should look something like this:

Code:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=81d5afda-0060-4b09-b6ad-0ec4ca44c675    /     ext4    errors=remount-ro    0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=16dcba94-f685-48f9-b644-cf0e3bda3e5a    none     swap    sw              0       0
# Mount DATA partition
UUID=1777422933172576    /mnt/DATA    ntfs-3g  defaults,windows_names,locale=en_US.utf8  0  0

If you don't see those last two lines, go ahead and add them to the file now.  I used your correct UUID information, so the lines should be correct.  Hit <Enter> once after the end of the last line, then save the file and close the text editor.

Unmount the root partition

Code:

sudo umount /mnt

Close the terminal.

Now try rebooting into your installed system again and report back results plus any other things noted above that needed to be reported on.