I've often heard that the advantage of GNU/Linux is that the home partition can be separate and that if in the case the system crashes and must be reinstalled, the home partition can be reused. So if this happens, how do I re-attach the home users to their original folders?

Say someone screwed up their home account totally to the point where we don't know where to start, but their mozilla is okay, and they have important docs, music, so on and so forth, how do I reset that home user's or any users home account to default while keeping particulars?

Sorry, I haven't troubleshooted GNU/Linux in a very longtime.

thanks

Well it is always a good idea to keep a separate /home partition for the reasons you mentioned above.
When you re-install just use that /home partition and mount it as /home for the new installation and all your data should still remain intact and hence you can re-use your configs like mozilla for example.
If a particular user messed up their /home/$USER, then the administrator as root can copy over his data and backup in a seaparate loction and delete that user and re-create the user and copy back the data to the newly created /home/$USER.

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How do I do this?

Just useradd and attach to folder?

Well, for example when the partition menu appears, and you need to choose which partitions you want for root, etc. Choose the previous /homepartition as the new installations /home, but make sure you don't select "Format".

You can use :
to specify that the older /home directory has to be used in case you get a warning"Home directory already exists."

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That is really helpful.

thank you