<decided to reformat>
 

<decided to reformat>

I made a backup of everything and figured it'd be easier to wait an hour for all 5 GB's to be re-copied than to fix the mess that was already there.

Cool.

hehe, i lost count of how many times i reformatted my box when i was first learning linux, good luck
p.s. as a hint, when reformatting also re-partition with /home as a separate partition so if you DO have to reformat again you don't have to wait for everything to copy since that partition can be left alone when nuking/reformatting the OS, then afterwords simply (as root) chown/chgrp everything in your user's home directory to the new user account and you should be set