I have a chrooted postinstall script that works fine on SLES8 and SL9.0 but not SL9.1 and SLES9. The bug is that any changes done to the /etc/password and /etc/shadow files are lost. The two things I have tried: useradd -m -p '$1$J1n.X/QK$hj1vaqARqf.O/RWisMGRn1' visitor ..... echo 'visitor:x:1000:100::/home/visitor:/bin/bash' >> /etc/passwd echo 'visitor:$1$J1n.X/QK$hj1vaqARqf.O/RWisMGRn1:12686:0:99999:7:::' >> /etc/shadow cp -a /etc/skel /home/visitor chown -R visitor /home/visitor chgrp -R users /home/visitor In either case, the commands complete with no errors, but when the system comes up after the install is all finished, I have the following: # ls -al /home total 2 drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 96 Sep 25 12:53 . drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 512 Sep 25 06:52 .. drwxr-xr-x 7 guru users 568 Sep 25 12:53 guru drwxr-xr-x 7 1000 users 568 Sep 25 06:44 visitor ^^^^ Note the how just the UID is listed. This is futher proof that chown command did work correctly in the postinstall script, ie, when chown ran, the visitor account was in the /etc/passwd file. And there is no visitor line in the /etc/password and /etc/shadow file.