Oracle virtual box login account / user absent

Question

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.

Answer 1

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 :-)