Arch Linux

le_cerf

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] I messed up my user account

SOLUTION:

Of course I had to solve the issue shortly after posting....  Turns out I also had to change ownership of the Home directory to the correct group for my user account and not only the user.
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Hello,

Installation details first:

Operating System: Arch Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 5.22.0
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.82.0
Qt Version: 5.15.2
Kernel Version: 5.12.9-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5 CPU 750 @ 2.67GHz
Memory: 7.8 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD RV730

Installed with the Wiki guide and running smoothly for months.  Root installed on a 120GB SSD.  Home was initially on this same drive, but I moved it to a 240GB SSD and symlinked to the original directory.

My situation:

My daily user account can not log in anymore at SDDM.  The screen froze, save for the mouse cursor; I have to hard-reset to get out of that.  Guest account and ROOT can log in normally.

For a reason I cannot recall, I tried running Dolphin as root using 'su root', tried to execute Dolphin, but it would not really start, then exited the 'su root'.  Odd things started to happen, as I could not start Dolphin anymore with GUI and trying to shut down or reboot would also not work with GUI, but did with CLI, after which I ran into the problem.

After some investigation, I found I could actually log in via CLI, but Xorg would not start, something about 'timeout in locking .Xauthority'.  Searching online, I found I likely gave up ownership of .Xauthority to ROOT, so logged as such and ran 'chown MyAcc .Xauthority', but it did not fix the issue.  It then looked as if my Home directory (from the 240GB drive) was completely owned by ROOT, so did 'chown MyAcc /home/MyAcc'.  I can now log in via SDDM, but not with my usual configuration, it instead seems to load the ROOT user config.  I also have a message printed over the wallpaper saying the MyAcc Home directory is not reachable.  I then did 'chown MyAcc /home' so I could take ownership of the symlinked 120GB original Home directory, in case that was an issue, which changed nothing.

I'm afraid to dig myself deeper by trying anything else here.  I seem to be missing some of the commands I ran from either MyAcc or ROOT bash history files on top of it, which is not helping me figure this out.

It's my first help needed post here, I apologize if my posting format is a bit off.

Regards - le_cerf

Last edited by le_cerf (2021-06-11 02:05:53)

Gepetto

Member

Registered: 2021-06-02

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] I messed up my user account

I'm glad you fixed the problem. Just for future reference, instead of symlinking every file in your new home directory to the old one, it would probably be much easier (and much less error-prone) to just replace the old /home partition in /etc/fstab with the new one.

le_cerf

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] I messed up my user account

I actually had to go back in the ROOT account and redo a chown -R command on my Home directory as even the GUI way with checked 'Apply to sub-folders' did not give me back the contents of the directory.  Everything seems correct now.

Gepetto - it could be that I ended-up modifying /etc/fstab after initially symlinking, I'd have to check, but saw something that might point to this, while looking for something else in my bash history.  I do these things, it works and I'm happy, thenI kind of forget.  I really should take notes!