Guys I will be following this closely so please hang in there with me but I am too frustrated to make civil replies right now.
Please answer me like someone who flunked Linux 101 because that is the way I really feel right now.
Ray, ya done flunked Linux 101.
This is not going to help your present situation much, because you've compounded one error on top of another to the point there's not much to work with, unless you have a copy of the old
/home/ray directory somewhere. (
Assuming that is the name of your default user.) Hopefully it will help
avoid something similar in the future.
In the other thread, you started by saying you reinstalled because you had no luck booting with the new MB. That says nothing about what happened when you did try to boot. That information alone would most likely have been enough to allow us to tell you what steps were needed to reconfigure your existing system to use the new MB without any need to reinstall. Telling us, after the fact of a failed installation, does nothing useful for us or you. The time to ask questions is before making any changes to your installed OS, not after destroying everything on it. Had you done that, we could have told you what to expect, what processes would need to be done, and the order of those processes.
I'm typing this from an installation that was just moved from an old 2002 Compaq, with an AMD 2100+ 32 bit processor to a MB with an AMD 64 x2 5200+ processor. Previous RAM was 2GB DDR, now it's 4GB DDR2. Graphics were built in nVidia GeForce4 on the Compaq, now PCIe slot nViidia GeForce 8600 GT separate card. Ethernet card and sound are built in on both MBs, but different chip sets entirely, this board having gigabit Ethernet, where the old was 100 Mb. While the installation itself is on an external drive that was connected by USB cable on the Compaq, (which had no USB boot capabilities, and only IDE drives internally) it is now connected by eSATA and acts as the boot drive.
The point being, as drastic as the change between these two MBs, all that was needed was a systematic reconfiguration of each item, in the proper order, to have the system working properly on the new hardware setup. The most drastic change was the need for a
different initrd image on this machine, so the
proper controller modules would be loaded, to see the
SATA drives. This was done from a
liveCD session.
As for saving the old
/home/ray directory on a
separate partition, the best way I know to do this is
not tell the installer about that partition. When installing to a single
/ partition, a new
/home/ray would be created by you, on first boot. The new
/home/ray would be on the
/ partition itself, so not overwrite the one
existing on the
separate partition. Only
after the
new /home/ray is created, as
root, you would make an entry in
/etc/fstab to mount the separate partition on
/home, then reboot. On the second boot, the
old /home/ray directory, on the separate partition, would then be used.
