Reformat only the home partition

I have 3 partitions: swap, / and /home. How can I safely reformat /home? Do I have to take additional steps aside from ordinary reformating?

1 Answer

I assume you already create some backups of your important data (because they are hard to recover after a reformat).

The following step should do it:

• Login as root (required, since you will remove the home folder of the current user)

  $ sudo su –

• Unmount the /home folder

  $ umount /home

• Reformat the home partition (make sure, hat you select the right partition. Check in /etc/fstab and run lsblk)

  $ mkfs.ext4 -F /dev/sdXX

• Mount the empty filesystem to /home (if the filesystem has changed, modify /etc/fstab accordingly)

  $ mount /home

• Re-Create home folders for existing users.

  $ cp -r /etc/skel /home/username
  $ chown -R username:usergroup /home/username

That’s it.