How to properly re-establish users after a reinstall?
Josef Lowder
joe at actionline.com
Mon Apr 20 18:40:29 MST 2009
A question about how to properly re-establish the two users that I had
prior to reinstalling my Linux operating system (only the OS in the
"/" partition)?
I had to reinstall because when I tried to install Virtual Box, it
screwed up my system and caused "X" to no longer work. I could get to
the command line, but could not startx.
So, I used the live CD that I had initially used to re-install just
the "/" portion that I had previously installed on /dev/hda5, and I
reformatted only that "/" partition but I *did not* reformat the
"/home" partition that was on /dev/hda7.
In my original installation, I had created two users: /home/joe and /home/patti.
The reinstall process required a user other than root to be created,
so I created user "patti" (because she had nothing crucial to be
protect), but I did not create a new user "joe."
The reinstallation went fine and "X" was restored; and when I examined
the results from the command line, I found all of my original user
files were preserved (curiously in /home/joe/joe) even though I did
not create a new user "joe."
But here's the confusion: I now have two "patti" directories.
One in /home/patti and another in /home/joe/patti.
$ df shows the following file system:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 3.9G 875M 2.8G 24% /
/dev/hda1 10G 4.3G 5.8G 43% /mnt/win_c
/dev/hda7 7.7G 1.6G 6.2G 20% /home/joe
So, my question is, can I just move /home/joe/patti to /home/patti?
And then create a new user "joe" and move the old /home/joe/joe to
/home/joe?
Or is there something different I need to do to make sure that I don't
create problems?
FWIW, I uploaded a survey of the newly reinstalled system's files at
this link: http://www.upquick.com/view/t40.pdf
joe at actionline.com
More information about the PLUG-discuss
mailing list