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I have set my existing /home partition (from about 10 previous distros!) as /home during install but cannot login. Rebooting into recovery mode and resetting password doesn't help, however while in recovery mode as root, running ls /home gives a blank listing. It seems that Ubuntu has neither established a new /home/john nor used the old /home/john. It may even have formatted the /home drive (but DEFINITELY was not told to) anyway my question - how do you get Ubuntu to create new user files or better, use the existing /home/user as most distros do? I have installed it twice now to no avail.

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You can use the adduser command from the recovery mode to add a new user.

For example, if you were to create a user with administrator privileges named john, the command would look like this:

adduser john --group sudo

If the old home directory is intact and properly mounted, you could try specifying its path:

adduser john --group sudo --home /full_path_here
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  • That doesn't help - there is already a user called john, it just doesn't have a home directory using ext2fsd on windows I have verified the /home partition still exists and still contains the user john with all the usual subdirectories and existing data.
    – john
    Apr 27, 2013 at 23:52
  • John is just an example, it could be mike, earlyspring or askubutnu as well. Create an admin user with a different name, so that you can login and use the system properly.
    – mikewhatever
    Apr 28, 2013 at 3:46

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