On Saturday 13 August 2005 10:43, Mike Roy wrote:
Hello everyone: Well, seems there's trouble right here in River City :-( I was planning to do a fresh install on my AMD 64 / SuSE 9.3 desktop machine and decided to save my '/home/mike' directory on a separate hard drive (which I did). I then performed a basic install and then copied the 'saved' /home/mike directory to replace the /home/mike directory created during the install. Not sure what I did or didn't do but when I tried to open the files or use the devices, I kept getting KDE error messages (will not save configuration). I have now done anohter clean install but, if possible, would like to use the 'saved' /home/mike directory. Not sure if this is a permissions problem or what. The old directory is still on the separate hard drive so I do have access to it. During the last corrputed install, I was able to save important working files to my laptop so all is not lost. It would be nice if I could salvage my earlier settings, etc., as this would save me a lot of grief. Any ideas. I did offer Tux a sacrifice of dandylions and some dead bugs - not sure if this will help ;-) Cheers, Mike
You don't say what version of Linux your old home directory came from but is possible the user IDs don't match. Even if they are both known as "mike" that doesn't mean the actual numeric UID matches. For example older SuSE versions used 500 as the first general user's UID. Latest version (9.3, don't know about 9.2) uses 1000. Several ways to fix this, but I think there are two basic approaches: 1) Do what you attempted above, but also change ownership of the old /home/mike/* to "mike" thereby getting the new numeric UID. 2) Let SuSE create a new home directory for you and then copy your original files to your new home directory. I suggest the second option because there may be some configuration files (e.g. .kde/*, .profile, .bash_rc, etc.) having new or changed contents reflecting differences in the newer SusE, You may not want to simply replace these new files with your old ones. Bob