I’ve done a fresh install on my laptop to replace Ubuntu.
Something went awry during the install and I had no desktop on reboot. I ran a full update and rebooted and all was fine but my /home directory wasn’t mapped to my data drive, which is my usual setup.
I moved /home to /home.old got some errors, logged out, logged in as root, remounted and all looked good.
But now if I try to log in to my own account I just get a shaky login prompt and it says my password is wrong (it is not)
I tried changing my password while logged in as root - no change.
EXTRA INFO:
Explaining properly: I’m doing this as part of a process to switch my `/home’ to my data drive which normally involves…
Rename /home to /home.old
Create a new empty /home directory as a mount point
It probably means that now you have no /home and nothing in it.
Those errors could have been interesting.
The description of your setup is rater vague, too.
Sorry, but that folder is not yours per se. The one that is yours is /home/yourUserName
Never a good idea to log in the Desktop UI as root … is like you are trying everything to break your system.
Since you actually no longer have a /home folder in that system, nor youruser in it, there is no .Xauthority file either … you have a system without user …
Never a good idea to log in the Desktop UI as root … is like you are trying everything to break your system.
Didn’t have much choice - it was the only open avenue - not something I do on a regular basis. Also required for mounting a different /home location (which I glossed over in my question - pretty crucial point, really!).
In fact I messed up the switch process because I should have logged out and logged in as root BEFORE I moved the old /home to /home.old so as not to bork my account - logging out and logging back in as root was the first step that I forgot to do!
My user account was able to log in after I rebooted clean. I think, because I’d tried to move the /home mapping while actively logged in to the using account it only partially succeeded and left the user account in a weird state (because it had no ‘/home’). this…
Since you actually no longer have a /home folder in that system, nor youruser in it, there is no .Xauthority file either … you have a system without user …
(Updated question for greater clarity)
The process should be…
Log off and log in as root
Rename /home to /home.old
Create a new empty /home directory as a mount point