I have searched and searched and from what I see there are several similar cases, but the only case that was the same wasnt resolved. I have tried every suggestion presented thus far on this board, and Im hoping that I can get a new angle. Im fairly new to linux, and just downgraded from fc6 to fc4 in the hopes that it would agree with my Toshiba Satellite A60 more. I had heard that everything was supposed to work fine right off the bat, however that hasnt been the case. I was attempting to move a driver for my wireless card into the appropriate folder but (as the result of following what I soon found out were VERY bad instructions on the interent) I moved the home folder instead of the folder I was actually wanting to move. Because of that, my computer froze and when I booted back into the system it came up with an error that said (paraphrasing because I forgot to write it down)

If I click yes than it pops up with another error message stating that the login attempt has lasted less than 10 seconds.

I have pressed ctrl-alt-F1 to the network login screen and have tried several combinations of useradd and adduser and while I am able to add the user and edit the password of that user- it refuses to create a directory for me. I have restarted and logged in and out (as was suggested before) but the same error box still pops up. I have attempted this with different usernames and it all has the same outcome.

I also read a suggestion to a person who had a similar problem in Ubuntu that said I should try "mkdir /home/USERNAME" but another error appears with this:

The same error appeared when I tried the second suggestion which was "chown username /home/USERNAME"

All of these suggestions have been attempted in the root terminal and in the network login screen thingermabob. Still no avail. I dont really want to have to rewrite everything, but I will overwrite it again if I need to. I would just like to learn how to fix this so that, in the future, I will know what I should avoid and what I can do to fix any other stupid mistakes like this one.

Oh, another note... possibly useful. I found the home directory that was missing, but it is no longer listed as Kristen's Home. Currently its sitting on the desktop of my Root account... I dont know if there is anyway to get it to apply or not.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

If you are in root, the pathname is user/Kristen/home, not /home/Kristen. Check that, if you are in 'home' in the root account, that is /root/home. Don't run in root, its bad for you. I hope you aren't running the internet rite now.

Nope, working off of a seperate computer to read the internet and working on the terminal at the same time on my laptop.

I tried it w/ the different routes and it still pops up with the same error messages. Should I be trying a specific combination of options in order to create the home directory under my username?

PS- just out of interest... why is running the internet in root so bad?

Uh-don't know about the directory. Can you reinstall?

Internet is bad in root because it lends you to Crackers and rootkits (virus term for Linux)