Hi there,

I have a 3 account setup on a Dell Optiplex 500 desktop, with 3 Gb of RAM, a Mint 13 KDE LTS single install on an internal 40 GB HD and home on an external 1TB.

Now one of the accounts (not the admin's, happy enough) refuses to boot at all, whereas the others work just fine and at normal speed. I can't find a way of getting to see what exactly is happening, as the failure message is flashing away immediately. And can't find a way to make that pesky account boot again.

It's not a question of losing data, I can from my admin account see and copy all the data of the non-booting one.

I would appreciate if someone could show me a way to recover the account?
Thanks!

Is this after logging in to the desktop, or attempting to?
How is this "failure" evident exactly?

Thanks for help, Habitual.
Booting the PC is not a problem, but once I try to log into the one account, it refuses to do so and I can see in a flash a terminal screen with some text. When I choose one of the two other accounts, it logs in immediately. Do I try a 'switch user', same problem, it refuses to log in. Weird... I presume somebody must have done something like pushing two keys at the same time and broke a command?

I'm quite sure it will be the same here, biiskaps, but 1) not the whole install is broken, just one of three accounts 2) a new install doesn't explain what happened and how to solve it when something similar would occur in the future.

Try /var/log/messages, /var/log/secure

Checking log files is always a good thing. I like to check using the less command, as that allows me to navigate them.

It sounds as if something has gone wrong in one or more of the hidden configuration files/directories (the ones whose names start with a dot) in that account's home directory, as the problem is limited to that one account.

One way to test that is for root to move all those files to to some safe backup location. Then have user log in; when user does log in, all those configuration files will be recreated. If user logs in successfully, that will verify that one or more of the config files/directories was the culprit.

If it's important to keep the original configuration as much as possible, you can test by moving the old files and directories back into place one at a time and having user log in. This will identify which one(s) is the culprit.

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What message is being flashed?

Cheers!