No but I rebooted the system after the change. do still need to update it regardless the reboot?

no, I just removed them with the live cd and repartitioned it (Im assuming its doing the same thing under the hood?)

editing the /etc/fstab didnt work (I just changed the path but not sure if the uuid plays any part) but ill give the rm/mkdir part a go

the command returns my user dir and a lost+found dir

yes it is a symlink to /var/home