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I can't seem to open my desktop anymore. After powering on my 64 bit ubuntu Alienware laptop I see the login screen and I can reach a desktop as guest (no password). However, using my normal user name and password brings me back to that same login page I just entered my password in.

And also I am not able to see my home folder.

Someone suggested me to delete the ~/.Xauthority file. But I don't see my home folder at all. I just have the /home but no /home/user.

I hope my home folder did not get deleted.

Gokul Navalore
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2 Answers2

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I got to the bottom of this. I have two users in my machine /home/user /home/test

And my "user" directory was missing which for some reason ended up in the "test" directory a.k.a /home/user2/user1

I have no clue why and how it happened.

I moved it back to /home and everything worked fine and dandy.

Thanks again for all your help.

Steps done

  1. CTRL + ALT + F3
  2. Login using your "user" account via terminal.
  3. It will put you in the root folder (since your /home/user is missing)
  4. Find your user directory using the below command sudo find / -name user
  5. This gave me the result /home/test/user
  6. I moved it back to /home by giving the below command sudo mv /home/test/user /home

and rebooted and it's all good and dandy.

I guess this happened bcaz I forced a reboot when in the background some updates were happening to my machine.

Gokul Navalore
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I had the same problem when my home folder was deleted. LightDM seems to throw you back to the login screen if it cant find your home folder. If you can't find your home folder anymore I assume that that's whats causing you to get thrown back to the login screen

To recreate your home folder try logging in from the terminal ctrl + alt + f1 and remake the directory with mkdir. This wont save your data though

Qwertie
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