Hi Ralph
Thanks for info. (Use Mint 14 at moment but see below)
Tried looking at /etc/passwd and found entry for me and it's the same as
your example except 'ralph' entries are 'clive'. That looked OK so
looked down all lines and found the following which may be 'wrong'.
nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:nonexistent:/bin/bash
kernoops:x:106:65534:Kernal Oops Tracking Daemon,,,:/bin/false
and
smbguest:x:1001:1001:Samba Guest Account:/dev/null:/dev/null
Don't know if any of this is relevant.
/home/clive still shows nothing in it even with show hidden files
ticked, all done from live disk. Would like to know what has happened
even if I can't get data back.
Think I might do a new install of Mint 16 and chance my luck. The only
things I'll miss are the emails, calendar and Address Book (which will
have new address's recently added. I know I'll have to set-up from
scratch and re-install some non standard programmes; unless you have any
further ideas?
Clive
On 07/03/14 13:31, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
Hi Clive,
Should I boot from a live disk and see if I can find the old 'Home'
directory?
Boot from a live disk and look at your machine's /etc/passwd.
It has lines like
ralph:x:1000:1000:Ralph Corderoy,,,:/home/ralph:/bin/bash
that give the username at the beginning, the "friendly" name in the
fifth, colon-separated, field, and the home directory in the one after
that. There will be lots of "users" for the machine's own use, e.g.
gdm. You're looking for signs of your normal username and these odd new
ones, which might be showing you bits of the comment field.
You can also look to see if the home directories are still there and
what's in them.
Remember, from the live disk they will all be under a lower mount point,
/etc/passwd will be /mnt/sda1/etc/passwd or something, so don't look at
the live disk's /etc/passwd by mistake.
Cheers, Ralph.
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