I have a “home” partition, now how do I get my system to put my files there?

Question

When setting up my system, I created a partition and mounted it as "/home", so I assumed my documents would land there, but they do not. When I open and select my user name, Levde, I get a standard user file system.

When I select "Documents", because I have used it, I find the directory I called "machine&software". Then I go to "home", listed as a device, and what I find there is the "lost & found" file, but not my "machine&software" directory. So I know that my effort to define this device as the location for my "/Home" directory failed. Here is an image of Gparted showing mount point information and how much space I allocated to each partition.

I don't know how to assign "/home" status to my "/home" partition, and at this point, how to move the standard document template from the root directory to a new mount point. As of now, the folder "Levde" is found in the root directory under "home", where it should be (root home levde). Here is an image that shows where my "/home" partition is mounted:

Across the top you will see Ubuntu Studio's path rendering "[root icon] media levde Home." Obviously when I set up my partitioning and instructed the installer to mount this partition as "/home", that was not sufficient for it to BE /home. I don't think I installed it as "root media levde home", but that is where it landed.

Considering these thoughts, I thought "perhaps I need to change its mount point!" I unmounted it in gparted, but gparted would not allow me to mount it again, anywhere, so that strategy didn't work, this time.

In comments I was asked to report "cat /etc/fstab". I report this as an image file:

Answer 1

Ok, so if I understand you problem correctly, you have a separate partition on /dev/sda4 that you want to be Home, and which is now mounted on /media instead. You will have to tell the system to mount it in the right place, but before that copy everything you have right now in your current Home directory into your new Home partition so you can switch seamlessly afterwards without losing any configurations you may have made already.

Step 1 - Copy Home directory

It seems that your new Home partition on /media/levde/Home is empty right now. Copy all files, including hidden files and subdirectories, from /home/levde to /media/levde/Home.

Step 2 - Add Home partition to fstab

Next you need to tell the system which partition to mount to /home. To do that, open /etc/fstab in an editor of your choice (gedit, nedit, kate...) as superuser, e.g. via sudo gedit /etc/fstab.

In another terminal, enter lsblk -f /dev/sda4 to get the UUID of your new Home partition.

In the fstab you're editing, add a line at the end like this:

UUID=$UUID_you_just_found_out /home/levde ext4 defaults 0 2

and replace $UUID_you_just_found_out with the UUID that lsblk gave you.

Save the file and exit the editor.

Step 3 - Reboot

Now all you need to do is reboot, and the new partition should be mounted under /home/levde. To verify, do a lsblk in a terminal and check where /dev/sda4is mounted.

Notes

Note 1: It is worth mentioning that the content in the original /home/levde directory is not gone, it is just "covered" by the mounted new partition. If the partition is unmounted again, the original home partition will reappear.

Note 2: This procedure only copies your current user's home directory to the new partition. Any additional new user would end up on your system's root partition again.