wait: the users home drive got re-created on the RECOVERY partition or on the main hd partition? i'd be shocked if your users home drive got added to the hidden recovery partition as i thought that was locked down and installed from an image during the installation of lion.

got snapshots?!

regardless, you should still be able to unhide and mount that partition, migrate the data to where it needs to be and continue to use symlinks (or whatever other method you were using previously), to redirect from the main HD to the data partition.

yeah, basically at first login for any account, a new users profile gets created.

screen shot of where the logged in local admin's user profile is stored (Recovery HD/admin)

external image link

and a screenshot of the old local admin user folder (Data/admin)

external image link

haha yeah, trying to automate it all so the Desktop techs don't have to do much other than boot into the NetInstall.

Hmmm, a complete guess here, but it is possible that whatever creates the home directories at first login is using some old logic from pre-Lion and sees the disk partition ID that it was using before, which may now be the Recovery HD, and just creates them there? In other words, if your Data partition was using an ID of disk0s3 before, somehow when upgrading to Lion the Recovery HD is taking over that ID now (and it does list as disk0s3 in a normal install), and the accounts are getting created there?
I know that's a real shot in the dark, but I can't even fathom why else user accounts would ever get created on the Recovery HD partition. In fact I would think any attempt of the OS to even write to that would get flat out denied. The fact that its letting home folders get created there is... surprising?

haha yep, that's what i believe the issue is.

but i was hoping to automate something, like would it be possible to change the Recovery HD to a different ID other than disk0s3 with a script in System image utility and built into the netinstall.
rather than have the guys upgrade, get a booter and manually change/remove drives.

haha at last resort, we can just rebuild with my Lion image... would be cleaner, just take a little longer backing up data etc (as with the Split partition that was setup, migration assistant doesnt work) hence me reverting it back to a single partition.

Yep,
after a bit more sleep and double checking, a symlink has been setup with /etc/fstab to point to disk0s1. while the "Data" drive has changed to disk0s4.

contemplating editing a similar script to the remove recovery partition to move the contents of disk0s4 to the users folder, then erasing disk0s4 and merging the data back into the Macintosh HD drive, then also deleting the fstab entry. so then it will boot on one partition.
but then there might be some macs in my environment that have multiple HDs ie. some studio machines. which makes me cautious of deleting a disk etc.

I think it might be best to tell the team to just reimage the machines to have a standard build on Lion.

thanks for pointing me the right direction guys!