New SDD/HDD setup, Moved Users/Home, Problem logging in

[nathantpham]

I recently "upgraded" my Macbook to have a SDD/HDD setup. I obviously did something bad in deleting stuff around the Users folders after the install was finished. I think perhaps everything I did after I cloned the HDD onto the SDD was wrong. Scoured the Internet and there's inconsistent information about where the Users folder should be located for optimum performance. I thought it should be on the HDD, so I moved it there... mapped it to be my home, and deleted everything on the HDD around it.

After I restarted the Macbook (Macbook 5,1 running Leopard 10.5), I get a message stating that my account could not be logged in:

You are unable to log in to the account at this time

These are individual the steps that I took in setting up the SDD/HDD:

1. Removed HDD and installed it into optical bay.
2. Placed SDD where HDD used to be.
3. Booted up the HDD and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone HDD contents onto SDD.
4. Restarted and booted SDD.
5. Went into System Preferences and redirected Home folder to HDD \Users\shortname.
6. Deleted everything on HDD except Users folder.
7. Deleted shortname folder in the SDD's Users folder, but left the Users folder there.
8. Created second admin account in SDD for alternative booting should a problem arise.
9. Restarted.
10. Problem arose.
11. Entered in through the second admin account fine, but did not have permissions to see files in the HDD Users/shortname folder.
12. Went online and found a supposed fix that would sort of reset my original shortname account. Link.
13. So I used restarted my comp in Single User Mode and used these command lines:

    mount -uw / 
    rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone 
    shutdown -h now

    When I tried to use the same shortname, it would not let me because it already existed.
14. Created new admin account with new shortname.
15. Logged in and copied HDD Users/shortname to the SDD and was able to retrieve all those files.

What should I do now? I don't mind starting from scratch with this new admin account. Should I just format the HDD clean using Disk Utility and forget about the old shortname?