Arch Linux

Phydoux

Member

Registered: 2020-03-02

Posts: 46

User /home folder not being created with useradd -m

I've been installing Arch in VMs now for quite a number of years and this is something new and kind of disappointing.

So. tonight I wanted to try out making a separate /home folder on a different partition. My hopes was it would work fine and I could just use a whole 2TB drive specifically for my /home folder and let the rest of the system live on another drive.

So, installing it in a VM this evening, I ran into a couple of issues which I've solved.

#1: The users /home folder not being created during the install process. I've always done this and this is the first time this has ever happened to me.

So, basically, I use the useradd -mG wheel username to create my user. Looks like it works fine. Then I do passwd username and make the login password. That works. After final setup is complete, I'll umount -R /mnt after exiting out of chroot. Then I reboot. When I login as my username, I see an error that says something about the users /home folder doesn't exist. So, I had to log out and log back in as root and do a mkdir /home/username Then I had to copy the files from /etc/skel/ to that user directory in order to make that work.

#2: The root file system was Read Only. I couldn't install anything with the root user account because the file system was read only. So I had to do a mount -o remount,rw / in order to fix that issue.

There was a 3rd issue but I figured there was something wrong with the April ISO because I've never ever had install issues before like these. So I just deleted that VM, created a new one and I used the February ISO and that worked fine. I added my user during the install. The user folder was there and intact under /home and everything worked great.

I haven't looked into it to see if there were any issues released about this Newest ISO. I'm hoping they fix it in the May release.

dimich

Member

From: Kharkiv, Ukraine

Registered: 2009-11-03

Posts: 577

Re: User /home folder not being created with useradd -m

#1: The users /home folder not being created during the install process.

Can't reproduce. With Arch ISO 2026.04.01 /home is created withing filesystem package installation by "pacstrap -K /mnt base ..."

Then I reboot. When I login as my username, I see an error that says something about the users /home folder doesn't exist.

Did you mount your home partition to /mnt/home/ before generating /mnt/etc/fstab and chrooting?

So I just deleted that VM, created a new one and I used the February ISO

Unfortunatery, after this we can't figure out what went wrong.