bind-home.conf not binding to /home on LL2.4/win8.1 UEFI dual boot set-up

[m654321]

Just before you sent your last reply (#17 above),  I had already made some progress yesterday with two cloned copies of the original pre-installed win8.1. 

I installed LL2.4 from scratch on each copy, with UEFI fully enabled in dual-boot.  Everything working beautifully as it did initially (i.e. prior to binding) in previous attempts, following Nehal J Wani's Youtube LL installation video.  For the two investigations described here, I followed Wani's video to the letter, so didn't have separate root and home partitions (as I previously had problems with a separate 'root' & 'home'). On sda I had just swap and root installed alongside the windows OS partitions.  I reserved sdb entirely for a single large DATA partition that takes up the whole drive.  GPT format used throughout as before. I ran two investigations, as follows:

***I should first mention two steps I took, in the present investigations, with each of the cloned copies: (1)  I left sdb as unallocated until  dual-boot was fully established and working in UEFI, and (2) when I carried out binding, I did this with UEFI enabled (fast & secure boot on) - I wondered if doing binding with CSM enabled (then UEFI enabled after binding), rather than UEFI enabled from the beginning of binding, had inadvertently led to the problem of me being unable to reboot into LL.  What I did seems to have worked, as I don't have any booting problems now for LL from the grub screen in either cloned copy, though establishing a real cause & effect is somewhat problematic (unless these things are repeated several times to confirm observations).

FIRST INVESTIGATION. 
I wanted to see if LL would bind to /mnt/DATA on sdb, if sdb was formatted as ext4 instead of ntfs.  Success - it does (the full formatted size of the sdb drive - around 920GB - appearing when I click Properties on each of the home folders).  But of course in using ext4, I am assuming that I've prevented win8.1 from sharing the folders on /mnt/DATA. So, though I have binding for LL, which is a result, I probably don't have folder sharing for win8.1. 

SECOND INVESTIGATION
I wanted to see if LL would bind to /mnt/DATA on sdb, if sdb was formatted as ntfs (as in the previous unsuccessful attempts), so that I could share DATA with win8.1.  What was different this time, compared to the unsuccessful attempts that didn't allow me to reboot into LL, was that I took the steps described in the paragraph marked *** above.  The success I had here was that I have no problems now in rebooting LL from the grub screen as in the first investigation above, but when I check properties for the home folders it's clear that binding hasn't occured.

I am keep the drives for both set-ups (described above) for further investigation.  However for now I need to use the 1st set-up as I need a computer for my work! Also I'm back to work on Tuesday 5th May so don't have much time to play around with this system after having a week off work.

Thankyou for your continued support... much appreciated as always
Regards
Mike

PS. When I've finally got the setup fully working I'd be happy to post a tutorial for this, if you would like (?), which would  include a transcript of Wani's video, just to make things easier. Obviously, I'd ask you, goldfinger, to check it before final posting, as I wouldn't like others to copy any of my 'bad practice'..!!