as far as I know it should be possible?
was your home partition actually mounted at /home
or another location?
I'm not completely clear on that based on your post.
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as far as I know it should be possible?
was your home partition actually mounted at /home
or another location?
I'm not completely clear on that based on your post.
In Manjaro I went throught the hoops of setting it up and it worked flawlessly, I don't remeber the details but I assume it was in fact mounted at /home.
Pop_OS never mounted it at /home, I briefly accessed it through /tmp I believe, everything borked when I renamed /home into /home.bak and then I launched the file explorer, so it had nothing to do with my Manjaro /home mount...
Im not sure exactly how you borked it but you can generally just point the popos installer to your old home, it shouldnt format it unless its flagged for format during the install, make sure it isnt and you should be fine.
Mounting the home partition at /home in the installer should work. Deleting the /home of the user you're logged in as isn't going to work because the applications you use to do it will most likely try to write something into ~/.local or .config, do it's never really empty. You could log into the root user though and do it from there.
Btw. It's not really beneficial to put your home partition on an HDD for the same reason. All Programs you use are going to have to access some hidden config or data files so it's going to slow everything down. (Also in case you use Steam, it installs all the games in ~/.local) A better way is to mount the HDD somewhere else and symlink your ~/Documents, ~/Pictures etc to the HDD.