Unable to reinstall same user profile in Ubuntu

lazylogic · 02-12-2009, 04:37 PM

I am trying out Ubuntu 8.10 and had installed /home in a separate partition. 4 users were created.

After many days of messing around, noticed that I've installed/removed to much things and wanted to start all over again as a new installation.

Reinstalled Ubuntu 8.10 but was unable to create the user profiles using the previous user profile settings that were in the /home partition.

Error message :

Quote:

Home directory already exist
Please enter a different home directory path

Remembered that I was able to do the same in Debian

Where did I do wrong?

jstephens84 · 02-12-2009, 04:40 PM

Try moving your /home/<user> to /home/user.old then try and recreate the user.

lazylogic · 02-12-2009, 04:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jstephens84

Try moving your /home/<user> to /home/user.old then try and recreate the user.

The intent is to use the old settings/customization. Creating a new profile is possible but defeats the purpose

Or is there a way to shift the old profile aside and shift it back to replace to new profile when created?

jstephens84 · 02-12-2009, 05:09 PM

well you could manually edit the etc passwd file and add the users there. Then do a passwd to add their password to the shadow file.