How do I move my /home directory to a new partition?

[cranny]

Hi,
I'm running a fresh installation of debian from an SD card. I've created 4 new users.
I want to move my /home directory to hard drive partition sda1. This partition already has 4 folders matching the names of the 4 users. These folders already contain a considerable amount of data.

I've renamed the original /home folder and created an empty one.
I've added the following as the only line in /etc/fstab

/dev/sda1 /home ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1

Everything seems to work fine if I mount using    mount -a
and If I log on as one of the four new users, I start out in the appropriate home directory on partition sda1.

BUT if I reboot it doesn't work and I can't start up in debian from the SD card. I have to boot using Ubuntu from the NAND and edit the fstab file for the SD card by deleting my added line to get the SD card working again.

Any advice please? (Keep it simple if you can - I'm a newbie)

Thanks,
Phil

[NewIT_Marcus]

Phil -
It could be a spin-up issue. Take a look at the plug computer forum for discussion of spin-up and spin-down issues.

TBH, if it were me, I'd be more likely to leave /home on the plug, and mount subdirectories within /home. Of course this might not be suitable for your purpose, but it could eliminate the possibility of getting locked out.

[cranny]

Problem solved 

A bit more experimenting and reading and I came up with:

UUID=3f8c5321-7181-40b3-a867-9c04a6cd5f2f /home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 0

I'm not sure which change made the difference. I suspect it was changing the pass number for the fsck to zero. I'm using a drobo so maybe fsck causes conflicts. I guess the drobo does its own checking.

The other change I made was using the UUID instead of /dev/sda1

Cheers,
Phil