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I have a problem that I have almost found the solution to, but not quite. I have 2 linux operating systems on 2 partitions of my computer. I have all my stuff in the /home directory of the ubuntu side. I would like to have the zorin side mount and use /media/rachel/4f116c3a-9703-45d5-a1f3-0a2fa3571088/home/rachel (which is the ubuntu user directory) as /home/rachel so that all my documents and desktop items are the same in both.

I did try one method where I created a symbolic link – but the problem is it tried to reference it before it ran my command in startup to mount the drive in the first place.

udisksctl mount --block-device /dev/disk/by-uuid/4f116c3a-9703-45d5-a1f3-0a2fa3571088

I have seen instructions for creating a completely seperate partition and mounting that as /home. I would prefer to avoid that. Is there a simple way to just remap where zorin looks for home?

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    Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! This question is not about Ubuntu. Please flag your question to be closed or to be migrated to UNIX and Linux Stack Exchange. Please do not cross-post. You may post on another Stack Exchange forum once you delete your question or it gets closed.
    – fosslinux
    Jul 25, 2016 at 0:20
  • I figured out a little bit more - Zorin actually uses /home/<user>/.config/user-dirs.dirs to know what to map the desktop and documents folders to. Problem is, it tries to access them before the drive is mounted so it can't find them and sets the user-dirs.dirs to default. I made a startup script to copy a user-dirs.dirs in after boot and it maps the desktop just fine. Only problem is it gives the "something went wrong" popup and I am not sure how to make that one go away.
    – Rachel
    Aug 2, 2016 at 1:12
  • please see my above comment
    – fosslinux
    Aug 2, 2016 at 1:16

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This really isn't recommended, as programs will store configuration files in your home directory. If a program has different versions on each OS, this can lead to bugs and data loss. It can also, as you noticed, cause problems when programs need access to files somewhere within your home directory before it's mounted.

It's better to link directories like Desktop or Documents individually and to allow directories like .config to differ.

This can be done with ln -s. For example, to share the Documents directory, you'd make sure the Documents directory was empty, open a terminal (press Ctrl+Alt+T), and run:

rmdir ~/Documents
ln -s /media/rachel/4f116c3a-9703-45d5-a1f3-0a2fa3571088/home/rachel/Documents ~/Documents

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