Reinstalling Server and same username issue

alejandroye · 05-08-2014, 09:03 AM

Hellouu,

I am having a problem with the new centos 6.5 reintallation. I reinstalled linux server on a old hard drive with the folders /var and /home folders already existing, so, in the hard drive there is an user already called "power" on the home folder, but now I need to use the same username where the group id is 500, how can I add the same username to get everything intact (sub folders).

#adduser power???
adduser: user 'power' already exists

would I have to do it manually?

please help

Doc CPU · 05-09-2014, 02:59 AM

Hi there,

Quote:

Originally Posted by alejandroye

I reinstalled linux server on a old hard drive with the folders /var and /home folders already existing, so, in the hard drive there is an user already called "power" on the home folder, but now I need to use the same username where the group id is 500, how can I add the same username to get everything intact (sub folders).

there may be better or more elegant methods, but here's what I would do:

Rename the existing /home/power to something else
Create the user "power", forcing the same uid and gid it used to have (using the --uid and --gid switches with adduser)
Log in and out as the new user to finish creation of the new account. That'll create a new /home/power directory.
Being root again, delete the newly created /home/power directory and rename the original one back to /home/power.

[X] Doc CPU