Reinstallation keeping old users

[ronso]

My mother board broke and had to get a new CPU. I kept my old HD with Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.10. There were 4 users in Ubuntu and my account had administrator privileges. I reinstalled on top of the existing partitions for Ubuntu but only formated the root partition. I created my new account with the same name I previously had and to my surprise I was able to access all my files just like nothing had happened. So I tried to do the same with the other users and I created accounts with the same names as the original ones but I get the message "$Home/.dmrc not properly configured" when they try to log in. Is there any way I can successfully create these users?

[darkod]

Depending how you created the new users. To add a user for whom a home folder already exists, look at post #2 here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1308767

That's how you should do it after reinstalling with keeping your /home partition.

[argail1980]

Probably, you were just lucky, when creating your first user, so that it got the same UID as the old one.. usually the first user's UID is 1000.

open a terminal (Applications > Accessoires > Terminal) and type:


cd /home
ls -la

that should look something like



drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2009-05-31 22:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4096 2010-02-05 13:50 ..
drwxr-xr-x 104 myuser myuser 12288 2010-02-24 17:44 myuser
drwxr-xr-x 104 otheruser otheruser 12288 2010-02-24 17:44 otheruser
drwxr-xr-x 104 otheruser2 otheruser2 12288 2010-02-24 17:44 otheruser2


if there are numbers instead of names i.e.


drwxr-xr-x 104 1002 1002 12288 2010-02-24 17:44 otheruser

your old users had other UIDs. For instance, you could have created them not in the same order.
Suppose the name of the user is "otheruser", you can change the ownership of their directories with:


sudo chown -R otheruser:otheruser /home/otheruser

That should enable them to login again.