separate home partition


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I've setup a separate /home partition for an ubuntu installation so that i could keep all the user specific files (home) on a different partition than the system files.

now i want to scrap the current OS setup and start all over again, but i want to reuse the same home partition on the next installation.

i wonder if there would be any issues when reinstalling ubuntu and just pointing it to the existing home partition. I know this does not work on a dual boot setup (eg. Fedora and Ubuntu using the same home partition due to some UUID conflicts or something - unless different usernames are provided). But would the same issues from the fedora/ubuntu dual boot example show up in my case too ?

Also, given that my username has already been created and is assigned a directory in the /home partition wouldn't it conflict with the username i would provide when setting up the new OS ?

Basically what I'm asking is if it is possible to just erase the current system partition, reinstall ubuntu, point it's /home to my home partition and just use my current user along with all the settings and preferences intact ?

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I'm guessing the UUID you mention is the UUID of the partition and this should have absolutely no effect on having a dual boot system. You should be fully capable of reusing your home directory across multiple distributions. However, there is a caveat (and perhaps this is what you meant by UUID): your user ID number, or UID, needs to be the same, or else the operating system will think you're someone else.

All operating systems (even Windows) enumerate usernames to some kind of unique number. In *nix this is usually a number, greater than 100, 500, or 1000, depending on your distribution. Regardless of what your username is, the system actually uses your user ID to identify you. Your UID <-> Username mapping is saved in /etc/passwd. As long as the line with your username is the same in all the distributions you use (and does not conflict with another username) you wont have any problems*.

* You might have some problems if you try to do any advanced stuff, like using ACLs. If you're not using them then you don't need to worry about it.

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Thanks for the information Vlad - you're actually right on the UID issue (at least I got the *ID part right :) ). Browsing through the internet i got to this page:

http://www.go2linux.org/dual-boot-two-linu...an-and-mandriva

where there's a short description on the UID and GUID numbers that have to match between OSes - I also figured why I bricked my ubuntu user after installing a dual boot with fedora

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