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I have two partitions on my sony laptop , 4 GB for OS and rest for /home dir ofcourse with some amount left for swap.

I have upgraded ubuntu 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS In my 10.04 installation ,before upgrade, the userid was "sashank" which was the only user in which all my files were there ( in /home/sashank)

After upgrading, the user id I gave for administrator was "sherry". I could login with this id, However I added another user "sashank", though if I try to login with "sashank" am not able to go beyond login screen.

How can I login as sashank and have access to /home/sashank as before the upgrade?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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How do you created the new user? With graphical tools or by useradd command? – Salem Jul 26 '12 at 16:38
using gui tools in settings/user accounts – sashank Jul 26 '12 at 18:05
can you provide the output of the following command: ls -la /home? – Salem Jul 26 '12 at 19:20
sherry@sherry-laptop:/home$ ls -ls /home total 28 16 drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Jun 8 2010 lost+found 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 30 2010 root 4 drwxr-xr-x 113 sherry sherry 4096 Jul 26 18:48 sashank 4 drwxr-xr-x 24 sherry sherry 4096 Jul 27 18:44 sherry – sashank Jul 27 '12 at 13:16
I created another user "abc" , it works fine , the problem is with only this user "sashank" which was present even before the upgrade too – sashank Jul 27 '12 at 13:19

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Based on your comment, i think the problem is with the ownership of "sashank" home folder. In the ouput of ls -la /home "sashank" folder belongs to user "sherry".

The problem is that, when you create the first user of the system, usually it stays with the user id (uid) 1000 and creates a folder in "/home", corresponding to the home folder of the newly created user. So before you upgraded your system, sashank had uid 1000. After you upgraded, probably "sherry" became uid 1000. So when you created user "sashank" it got another uid (1001, for example), and when you try to login with him it has no permission to write on his home folder (it was already there, and now belongs to "sherry").

To fix this use this command: sudo chown -R sashank:sashank /home/sashank. It will change recursively the ownership of the home folder of "sashank" account. Then logout and try to login as sashank.

This is just a guess, hope it helps.

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good guess, i suspected something like this , but was not muchclear .. anyway thanks a lot ! – sashank Jul 27 '12 at 17:28

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