I was logged on to my user account with Gnome Desktop. Next I plugged in two USB drives and ran partimage as root --- I was creating a backup of one usb-drive's partition on the other. Unfortunately, I sent the image to my internal drive. The drive, not surprisingly, filled to capacity (and, that is "root" capacity).

When I rebooted, the machine wouldn't let me log in --- it turned out that the disk was full. In the meantime I thought the error was a password error, so I logged on as root (in a terminal) and changed the user password that I was using.

Later, when I discovered that the problem was a memory error, I logged on as root and deleted the offending, very large, file.

OK, here is the problem. When I now log on (as "tom") I no longer see Gnome as it was configured. Nor are any of the former files that were on the old desktop there. And, I don't have my desktop wiki ("tomboy") where I kept all sorts of information.

Soooo, I need to know if there is any way to recover those files and settings.

It is possible that the tom's home directory got chagned. Log in as root, go to /home/ see what directories are there. If there is a /home/tom/ directory, take a look at the files in there to see if they are still there. If they are, you can try
Then log in as tom.

Nope. The files that are there are all empty --- things like Desktop. So I suspect that the originals were stepped on. Any thoughts on how to locate deleted files (if they WERE deleted)?

I CAN see content from a lost file if I

grep -a -B2 -A200 "Hi mum" /dev/sda1

so I know the underlying file(s) is (are) there.

I CAN see content from a lost file if I

grep -a -B2 -A200 "Hi mum" /dev/sda1

so I know the underlying file(s) is (are) there.

And the content CAN be recovered is tiny snippets.