Upgrade from 13.1 to 15.1 - Fails to boot in non-safe mode

[anatomist.noelectrons]

Are you familiar with results from?

ls -n /home

Seeing its corelation between user and group numbers and directory names should help, as the system tracks users and groups by numbers, not alpha strings. See also vipw, visudo and vigr.

I used 'id' command to check current user info and compare that with the ownership of the directories in old /home. I may be able to write a simple shell script to do this.

[tsu2]

Thanks again @mrmazda. After trying several things with the Nvidia drivers, I concluded it is a problem with Nvidia drivers. I tried to do 'startx' on the command line. It failed with error messages clearly indicating it was unable to load these drivers. So, I decided to do a fresh install of OpenSUSE Leap 15.1 on the partition that had OpenSUSE 13.1 and reuse the /home partition by importing the userids from 13.1 installation. It was successful, except that OpenSUSE Leap 15.1 installer, even after choosing to import users [I selected 2nd option during user creation: Create new users (NO), Import existing users(YES), Skip creating users(NO)], installer created a new /home and did not mount the old /home (I modified partition table to do this in the expert mode). Now, I have to figure out a way to migrate these users to the old /home (making sure uid and gid conflicts are all resolved.) I guess I will be spending more time on this than originally estimated.

I appreciate your insights and information on this thread.

This is not Windows which generates unique hashes for its user-based security.
If you simply point to your /home during your installation, your new User created during the new installation will use the old /home just fine without any special configuration.

I don't know your purposes for migrating your old Users to your new install, any local Users can be set up the same way, or simply create a new User and copy the old /home content to the new location. If you're talking about remote access to network shares, then it will depend on how security is set up for that network share.

Keep in mind that a commonly used rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with 3 Users or less, doing extra work to migrate and automate is generally not worthwhile compared to simply creating new Users and manually migrating data, configuration and apps. If you're dealing with 3 or more Users, then it might be worth spending the extra time to prep your migration and do it as efficiently as possible. So, 3 Users is the threshold when you could choose either option, it's a break even proposition.

My personal experience upgrading so many versions at once and especially for anything earlier than and including 13.1 has a fairly poor record... Even when I thought it worked, within a couple weeks problems would show up. If you want to try to upgrade from 13.1 again (Do you have a full backup?), I or someone else can outline a step by step way to upgrade which should be more successful. Before doing any upgrade though, you need to identify apps which will need to be upgraded separately... Are these simple workstations or are any Server apps running on them like webservers, database apps?

TSU