After recent system abrupt reboot, Oracle Virtual box with xUbuntu did not show user 'xxxxx' for login. I am able to login as root, I can see /home/xxxxx/, however, working environment with development tools are setup as 'xxxxx' user.
here is excerpt of ls -al in /home/xxxxx/
drwxr-xr-x 2 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 Jun 27 2014 Downloads
drwxrwxr-x 3 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 Mar 3 10:03 .eclipse
drwx------ 2 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 Dec 17 11:07 .emacs.d
drwx------ 3 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 May 22 08:22 .gconf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 xxxxx xxxxx 55 Dec 16 12:48 .gitconfig
drwx------ 3 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 Jul 1 2014 .gnome2
drwxrwxr-x 2 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 Dec 18 16:47 .gstreamer-0.10
drwxrwxr-x 3 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 Jan 20 13:23 https:
-????????? 1 ? ? 644 May 22 08:22 .ICEauthority
-rwxr-xr-x 1 xxxxx xxxxx 925 May 21 13:13 ICE.tar.gz
drwxrwxr-x 3 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 Jun 27 2014 .local
drwxrwxr-x 2 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 Jan 20 13:25 .metadata
drwx------ 4 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 Jun 27 2014 .mozilla
drwxr-xr-x 2 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 Jun 27 2014 Music
drwxr-xr-x 2 xxxxx xxxxx 4096 Jun 27 2014 Pictures
How do we restore ‘xxxxx’ account? chmod, chgrp, chown, try to replace file .ICEauthority all failed.
We can see that permissions for file .ICEauthority is corrupt, filesystem may also be corrupt.
Follow these steps:
1. Login as root
2. unmount the drive-partition on which /home/xxxxx is mount for example: umount /dev/sdd1
3. Run file system checkup tool 'e2fsck' on /dev/sddx, for example: e2fsck /dev/sdd1
4. e2fsck may ask to confirm fix, press key 'y' as many times as required.
5. ls -al would show all permissions restored.
6. Reboot xUbuntu, it would work :-)