User Account setup problem in LL/lubuntu/zorin/win7 multiboot

[m654321]

Sorry, I didn't forget about you -- have just been tied-up with other things for past few days.
"sam-the-editor" is showing in both groups 1001 and 1002, but group 1001 is called "sam".
Suggest we start fresh, so before we continue, if there is any data saved to home of "sam-the-editor" in Lubuntu, save it off to a USB stick first.  (You can copy it back later.)

Boot into Lubuntu as "happyfamily" (not sam-the-editor).  Open a terminal and enter this command to delete "sam-the-editor" account including respective home files.

Code:

sudo userdel --remove sam-the-editor

Run this command again to see who shows up as users on computer (with ID# > 1000):

Code:

awk -F: '($3 >= 1000) {printf "%s:%s:%s\n",$1,$3,$4}' /etc/passwd

Hopefully you only see:

Code:

nobody:65534:65534
happyfamily:1000:1000

Assuming that went okay, run this command again to see what groups (with ID# > 1000) are still on computer:

Code:

awk -F: '($3 >= 1000) {printf "%s:%s\n",$1,$3}' /etc/group

I'm guessing it will show:

Code:

nogroup:65534
happyfamily:1000
sam:1001

Many thanks gold_finger, in getting back to me. The above was fine & worked smoothly - the outcomes were as you predicted.
However the next step didn't work, as you will see from lubuntu's terminal output, after the quote below.

Now create "sam-the-editor" account again and it should end up with UID and GID both being 1001.  Here's the command:

Code:

useradd -m -G adm,cdrom,dip,plugdev,users,lpadmin,sambashare -s /bin/bash sam-the-editor

Output from Lubuntu's terminal in response to the last line of code:

Code:

happyfamily@happyfamily-X71Q:~$ useradd -m -G adm,cdrom,dip,plugdev,users,lpadmin,sambashare -s /bin/bash sam-the-editor
useradd: Permission denied.
useradd: cannot lock /etc/passwd; try again later.
happyfamily@happyfamily-X71Q:~$

I rebooted into Lubuntu, and ran the "useradd -m -G ......" line of code again, but the outcome was the same so I'm unsure now how to proceed.

Mike