SOLVED Mint won't boot even after entering good passwd

[sadhu]

In a brand-new install of LM18.3 I did something to my /home/sadhu directory, I am not sure what. Now when I boot, the green mint logo comes up, then the login screen. But when I type my password, the screen blanks for a moment, as if cinnamon is starting, but the the login screen comes back.

If I deliberately type a incorrect password, I immediately get the bad password error message,

How to fix this? Is there any way perhaps to rebuild a generic home directory--without a total re-install?


Thanks,
Sadhu

[Pierre]

try following this method:
https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/339
and see if you can reset the password,, to something else . . .

then log back in & test the new password.

[Flemur]

How to fix this? Is there any way perhaps to rebuild a generic home directory--without a total re-install?

After you boot into recovery/single/console mode (whatever it's called), try

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find $HOME ! -user $USER

if you don't own the files, take ownership of them, then see if you can login (w/GUI).

After that doesn't work, try

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sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

then see if you can login w/GUI.

After that doesn't work, try making a new user and see if you can GUI login with the new user.

[sadhu]

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find $HOME ! -user $USER
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
useradd <newuser>
passwd <newpw>
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

All had no effect.

I finally logged into the old install of 18.2-->3 on sda7, then mounted the new 18.3 partition using nemo, then

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sudo mkdir /media/sadhu/lm183-sda1/home/sadhu
sudo rsync -av /home/sadhu/ /media/sadhu/lm183-sda1/home/sadhu

and now it seems to be working.

The upshot is ... "be darn careful when you fool around with the /home/<user> directory.

BTW when I was fooling around with the recovery process, I found it necessary to type 'e' in the grub prompt for the recovery option, then edit the boot line from "ro recovery" to "rw recovery", otherwise my changes were discarded -- Read-Only File system. The instructions on https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/339 didn't work for me.

Thanks everyone for your help.

-Sadhu