Unable to mount home-directory for user after fresh install 14.04

Question

I performed an fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04. I have /home on a different partition from root. Installing 14.04 and mounting /home went without any problem. During installation I was asked to make a user and I made a new user with my user-name and password. My home folder was correctly added to my user-name. After this I made users for my different family members and adding their existing home folder which went fine except for one. In one case I could make the new user, same user-name as the home folder. Login for this user failed. The screen turns black and one would expect the desktop for this user to appear. I can hear the drum-sound which indicates that you are logged in, but the login-screen returns. I am unable to login for this one user. If I try to login this user in cli everything is fine. I can browse the home folder and files. Of course I don't want to loose the home folder for this user. What should I do? Thanks in advance.

Solution

Elder Geek is right about the UID.

The steps to check the problem goes like this:

$ cd /home/[user-name]
$ ls -la 

You might see the UID is appeared as number rather than your current user name, e.g. appear as 1002

drwxr-xr-x  2 (1002) ...bla bla... 40 Mei  22  2014 Documents

You can check your current user UID

$ cat /etc/passwd | grep [user-name]
[user-name]:x:1000:1000:[user-name] ...bla bla bla

If they are different (1002!=1000) than we know this is the problem.

Solution:

$ chmod -R [user-name]:[group-name] /home/[user-name]

You may now try to login.

Cheers : )

Comments

[Elder Geek]

It's possible that the user that you are having problems with has a different UID than before.