I am stuck and have tried reading up about solutions. Tried one or two but m concerned I may inadvertently do damage.

I upgraded a 10.04 to 12.04 64bit this afternoon. I selected the upgrade option and created a different username to the one I normally use (I thought this was sensible in case it overwrote my home folder)

I can log in and the system is fine but the four other users are not there. My old home folder and the other 4 are there with the usual encrypted folder message.

I recreated one of the users with the same username and password, however they cannot get into their folder either through Gnome or even by login in via terminal.

Any help on how to get these folders back will be gratefully received. I do not have the encryption keys for some of them because I didn't think I needed it if it was an upgrade. I am now kicking myself for not copying files first.

Thanks

User names are assigned a number when you create them. The user name in the file metadata is actually a user number. User numbers are assigned in the order that you create them. On your revised system the new user name has the first number and the rest of the users you created will have higher numbers than they had on the old system. You are having login problems and file ownership problems because of mismatched user names and numbers. You need to back up your data, delete all of your users, and recreate the users in the same order that you did it on the old system.

Or you could log in as root and issue chown commands for all of the files, but I don't know if encryption will get in your way if you try that.

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Steve Stites

Thank you! You are a star.

I have got back all but one account. Namely the first one because for some reason I cannot delete the account I set up when I upgraded. Have made root active and triedto delete using root rather than a sudo but it still won't.

I will hunt around for an answer to that - but 3 out of 4 recovered is a great start.

Thanks again

That may be because your distribution makes the first user account into the supervisor account and the system resists deleting the supervisor account. See if root can change the first user account into an ordinary account with no root privileges and then delete it.

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Steve Stites