First, something happened yesterday that started eating up my disk space till there was 0% left on my 1 TB ssd. (I have a suspicion of what may have caused it, but unsure). So I used these instructions
https://www.howtogeek.com/442101/how-to-move-your-linux-home-directory-to-another-hard-drive/
Of all the ones I found in search, this was the one most current with lots of explanation. I only found one issue (which may or may not be crucial) but a couple of screenshots showed a different directory in Konsole to execute commands and I never saw the cd into that directory. Otherwise, got to the fstab edit (via nano as I didn't have gedit installed), saved and rebooted. Would not boot into kubuntu and looked at journal and saw lots of errors.
So I used a usb to boot into ubuntu and now I am looking at my normal desktop as it was before I moved the home directory to the external hdd. And while I have timeshift files to use to restore if needed, I am wondering what next step I need to do to fix this so that I can boot without the flash drive and ensure my home directory is the one on the external drive.
Looking at my file structure, I can see the new external drive where I copied the home directory to is mounted on home. I do still have that backup of home on this hard drive and intend to delete it to clear space as this main ssd is 80% full. But until I know if the instructions I followed somehow didn't copy all the permissions (not a complete noob but reading the journal indicated this could be the issue) or if some other step caused this, I don't want to do that. And I have my doubts about the new home dir being used as while writing this I received a similar error as yesterday: Your root partition is running out of disk space (0% remaining) only yesterday it was my home directory out of space.
So to recap:
Since booting into a live environment where my desktop appears restored, I have not rebooted without the usb.
I saw some differing commands when copying home folder to external hdd to ensure permissions were transferred (as per the article, I used cp -rp)
I edited fstab as instructed and saved. Current file structure shows my home folder from the external drive as well as the backup copy.
I rebooted and could not get to desktop. I have attached screenshots of the file structure, indicating to me that the current session is using the home folder from the external drive. The 931.0 GB drive is the internal ssd. The external devices are 1.USB Flash live session
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So any info you need to help me resolve this, please ask. I don't want to do anything further if this is a simple fix I am not seeing.
UPDATE: Just to ensure my not being able to boot is NOT related to a known bug, I am getting a "mtd device must be supplied (device name is empty)" when I boot from the SSD where Kubuntu is installed. One post talks about the drive being full, others as recently as last month are talking about a bug. See these posts:
UPDATE 2: In response to David, I wish I could. Funny that when I first booted into live session, I was at 80% and within 30 minutes, 0%. I can delete the old home directory knowing I have the copy over on the external drive, but something is continuing to fill up the drive. My one suspicion, the only thing I did prior to the ext hdd copy/move was to install a note program called Taskade and saw I didn't like it and removed it. Later in terminal I saw a LOT of that name scroll by and wondered if it had something to do with the disk suddenly filling up. It's not timeshift as I only have a once daily and once weekly saved and it has been that way forever, so I don't think it would suddenly start filling up space with backups. So if I remove that 775 mg old home directory and it fills up the ssd to 100% quickly, I need to resolve what is causing this.
UPDATE 3: Now I know that I was not in a live session when my desktop reappeared with 80% full internal ssd. Going into BIOS to set the boot order for the live session, I now have 2 listings for my internal ssd: 1st - SATA3_5: WDC WDS100T2BOA-00SM50 and the 2nd - ubuntu (SATA3_5: WDC WDS100T2BOA-00SM50). If I boot from the 1st, display driver not in use as text is huge and booting from 2nd brings up a grub menu (which I never see in normal boot) with video driver in use as text is displayed normally. However, both go to the same spot in loading, but whereas I used to get a ^D to continue or other optional commands, now I get a graphical box in the center with "can't write to /tmp" and an okay button which does not respond.
When I entered the live session for the first time, my partition on the ext hdd for the home directory is there. The internal ssd shows 100% full. Not sure if in live session you can actually see all the contents in folders from the ssd, but the home.orig (backup of home) shows very little in it, whereas it was equal to the ext home directory.
Now I am at the point that I either use timeshift (and still maybe have the disk filling up quickly by some unknown issue) or do a fresh install and copy the ext home folder back to the internal ssd fresh install.
It would be great if anyone can explain the 2 listings of the same ssd in BIOS.
