I recently installed Ubuntu Desktop 23.04 on my computer. I have 2 hard drives: 500 GB and a 2 TB. Thinking I would have plenty of room for my videos and images I set the large drive to be /home

I log into the freshly installed OS. I set a few basic settings such as mirroring my 2 monitors. My settings don't save.

Next I realize my applications don't run. For example I try to run the Firefox web browser it acts like it will run with the spinning curser image. But it doesn't open up, no error message.

I open file explorer and see my /home folder is empty. I expect to see /home/dave I think this is my problem. My home folder is where my settings should be saved.

I investigate further with the following commands:

dave@ubuntu2023:~$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda3 during curtin installation
/dev/disk/by-uuid/4feb52ca-71b4-4463-b2cf-f7aece53b290 / ext4 defaults 0 1
# /boot was on /dev/sda2 during curtin installation
/dev/disk/by-uuid/c0b95236-d0e5-423d-b1e9-80c511ed5a87 /boot ext4 defaults 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sdb1 during curtin installation
/dev/disk/by-uuid/ffdfa468-05e1-45d5-83d3-9518bddbc3c5 /home ext4 defaults 0 1
/swap.img none swap sw 0 0
dave@ubuntu2023:~$ lsblk -e 7 -o name,fstype,size,fsused,label,partlabel,mountpoint,parttype
NAME FSTYPE SIZE FSUSED LABEL PARTLABEL MOUNTPOINT PARTTYPE
sda 465.8G
├─sda1
│ 1M 21686148-6449-6e6f-744e-656564454649
├─sda2
│ ext4 512M 180.8M /boot 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4
└─sda3
ext4 465.3G 13G / 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4
sdb 1.8T
└─sdb1
ext4 1.8T 2M /home 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4
sdc 0B
sdd 0B
sde 0B
sdf 0B
sdg 0B

dave@ubuntu2023:~$ getent passwd dave
dave:x:1000:1000: David Norman:/home/dave:/bin/bash
dave@ubuntu2023:~$

/dev/disk/by-uuid/c0b95236-d0e5-423d-b1e9-80c511ed5a87 /boot ext4 defaults 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sdb1 during curtin installation
/dev/disk/by-uuid/ffdfa468-05e1-45d5-83d3-9518bddbc3c5 /home ext4 defaults 0 1
/swap.img none swap sw 0 0
dave@ubuntu2023:~$ pwd
/home/dave

So it looks like I do have a home drive /home/dave
My 2 TB drive has a "home" folder but it's not the folder with my home folder in it.
It looks like maybe I need to reinstall. I can't remember the exact options but I did the partitioning during the OS install.
Here's how I set the partitions:
1 MB BIOS Boot Partition
512MB Boot
rest of the drive is root /
large (2TB) separate drive is /home

When I set the 2TB drive I was asked for the mountpoint. I think I set it to /home

It looks like it's /dev/sdb1. What does 'mount' say about it? 'mount /dev/sdb1 /home' Don't forget to make your user directory while the home disk is mounted on /home.

The line above is from your fstab output for the /home partition on sdb1. The line below is from your lsblk output for sdb1. They are different and need to be the same. I would comment out the above line in fstab (place a # at the beginning of the line) and put a new line in the fstab with the uuid from below to see if that is the problem after rebooting.

Have you tried starting firefox in a terminal? Do you get warning/error messages?

/home/dave doesn't belong on the 2TB drive. You have the 2TB drive mounted to /home. So on the 2TB drive, /dave should be in its / directory, if you are looking at the 2TB drive mounted somewhere other than /home for inspection purposes. Only when the 2TB is mounted on /home should /home/dave have your data in it.

The misbehavior you describe sounds like permissions trouble, a common result of misconfigured homedir. Does ls -l /home/dave show correct permissions and ownership for everything? Login as root, open midnight commander, and take a looksee easily if you switch the active pane to full width using the F9->listing format menu. I always keep the right pane in full and the left on half so I can Crtl-U anytime to quickly switch which shows all. Any necessary repair will most likely require root permission to apply.

If you find a /home/home/dave dir, most if not all its content probably will need to be moved to /home/dave - after any needed owner/perms work is complete.

FYI the output of the lsblk command from the OP shows the partition type not the filesystem UUID. They are not going to match in this case. If you notice all of the ext4 partitions have the same partition type.

If you show the contents of the directory with the ls command it is completely empty? What about hidden files i.e.
ls -la

Is this the only user on the system? Something might of gone wrong during installation.

You helped a lot. I followed this advice and now Ubuntu seems to be running right. I can now open applications such as Firefox and Thunderbird.
Although it's running my home folder is on the 500 GB drive. I need to move it to the 2 TB drive.

Now I moved my home folder.
All problems are resolved.