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Due to some hard drive issues my home directory was corrupted and I had to reinstall Ubuntu 17.04 GNOME. I recovered my files from the corrupted partition, but now, when I try to login, it just enters a login loop and, after a short black screen, it just goes back to the login screen.

I have tracked down the problem to the ~/.config directory (if I rename it, I can login normally).

My current ~/.config directory:

My current ~/.config

How can I find the specific files that are causing that error without renaming each of them individually and rebooting?

2 Answers 2

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The easiest way to fix this is to rename the .config folder to .config.HOLD, then log out/in, and let it create a new .config folder with the minimum required files, then copy all of the files from .config.HOLD folder into the new .config folder, skipping duplicates.

cp -an ~/.config.HOLD ~/.config
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  • I don't think this would really help because I do want to copy ALL the files (except the corrupted one) but if I do it like you said this could also copy the corrupted one and I still wouldn't know which specific file it was. Aug 31, 2017 at 20:58
  • @DominikSchmidt no, doing it my way would copy all the files EXCEPT the corrupted file that is causing the login problem.
    – heynnema
    Aug 31, 2017 at 21:44
  • @DominikSchmidt Something like cp -an ~/.config.HOLD ~/.config should work.
    – heynnema
    Sep 1, 2017 at 7:28
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    The copy command given should read: cp -anT ~/.config.HOLD ~/.config The option -T means --no-target-directory; treat DEST as a normal file. Nov 11, 2021 at 10:05
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First thing to do on unknown errors is looking into the relevant log files to get some hints on what may cause the problems.

For system issues the syslog is usually a good place to start:

sudo less /var/log/syslog
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