0

I had garuda linux installed since I was facing lot of stability issues with it. I decided to go with linux mint cinnamon edition. While installation I chose manual partitioning. Following are the changes I made while installation

  1. For root partitioon, I ticked on format partition and selected mount point as root and file system as btrfs earlier also it was btrfs.
  2. I did not select format partition for my old home partition and selected mount point as home with btrfs
  3. Eventualy I selected my efi partition for bootloader installtion
  4. After going through selecting timezone and maybe installation screen I was asked what to name the user directory. I switched OS after a long time so I forgot that to reuse the same old home directory we have to name it same while switching a distro and I renamed it with something else. After I booted, I saw that my old home data was not there and realized that I made a mistake while naming.

Now, If I check through gparted it shows me that out of 142 Gb of home partition 75 GB is already used. Out of which 72 GB is probably of old user directory and 3 GB is from new user directory I have. I tried to look at hidden files in my home directory and it doesn't show old user directory there. I also tried testdisk but it also doesn't show old user directory in it's analysis so I am assuming it's not deleted and it's there but I don't know how can I access it since I can't see it anywhere.

Your help is greatly appreciated if I can somehow access my old user directory

Improve this question
13
  • Is there a way to migrate the question to those forums ? Commented Mar 21, 2022 at 4:31
  • 1
    Yes, I'll flag it. Hold on. I asked a moderator to migrate to Unix&LInux. Commented Mar 21, 2022 at 4:31
  • yeah @DavidC.Rankin, but the old username home directory is nowhere to be seen to be accessible Commented Mar 21, 2022 at 4:35
  • 1
    If you ls -al /home and can't see the old user directory. Try again as root. The new distribution may use a differed GID for a common group that provides read-access to the old user directory. The key right now is to mount /home as READ ONLY to avoid the possibility of further compromise of the data. mount -o remount,ro /home (you can't have open files on /home when you remount) You may need to shutdown and boot from the install disk and chroot the new system or just mount the old /home at a temporary mount point under /mnt directly from the installer. Commented Mar 21, 2022 at 5:07
  • I tried ls -al /home as root and I only get current user directory and not the old one. Regarding mounting home as read only, I am not sure how to do that. Would it be okay to follow this guide Commented Mar 21, 2022 at 14:35

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

I will start with listing down things that I tried to access my lost old home directory:

  • Did ls -al /home with and without root still couldn't find any user directory other than the one created by new installation
  • I tried testdisk and couldn't find any trace of deleted content that was matching my old user directory this kinda made me sure that atleast the data is not deleted and is just hidden in some way or other
  • I also tried find [path] -name [filename from old user directory] as root but couldn't find any result out of it as well
  • Installed ncdu and ran it for /home and I could see space usage only for newly installed current user directory
  • I booted using live usb and tried this cat /proc/partitions and identified my home partition from results. I mounted my home partition through mount [partition_name] /mnt and then I did ls -al /mnt which gave @home guest [old_user_directory]. I checked contents inside [old_user_directory] and that is it. I could access my old home partition's user directory data. I copied it for backup and then tried few more things.
  • Finally, I tried changing owner and group permission for [old_user_directory] and then booted into my current installation and still I could not find any trace of my old user directory there.

Some Observations:

  • @home directory contained user directory of currently installed linux mint
  • I tried reinstalling linux mint but this time I gave user directory name as [old_user_directory_name] and I noticed that this user directory was again created within @home inside my home partition when looked through live usb mount.
  • Seems like user directories created by mint are residing inside @home and user directories from my previous distro remain inside home partition but outside @home
Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.