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I was using 12.04 lts as a fileserver(using Samba to access it from windows client machines) for a large amount of documents, and used to add files to it regularly. Yesterday I goofed up, I copied a folder into server, but noticed that I needed to move a directory and few files out to another directory. I moved few files, but while moving the directory, I used the command mv -t /* to my serving directory. This caused instantaneous crashing of my system and when I restarted, it failed to boot completely and got stuck while finding bin/sh while trying to execute the scripts.

Is there a way to recover it, although I have the backup of may be 95% documents in a external HD, I need the rest 5% too.

Please help.

Boot from a Live CD and correct your grave mistake.

Can you please direct me how to do it, I tried accessing it, but could not see any of my files.

Next time use "echo" and run something like to see what it would do if unsure. Note the glob expands to all top level directories so you should look in the first directory in the list (prolly /bin) for those 5% documents you need to salvage. Then restore the system from backup to make certain and re-populate your "serving directory".

Ok, will try it. But there is shell access from system only through the live CD. I may need to mount the drive. When i did try to mount it, i was unable to mount it. At least if i could mount it, could have copied all the latest files.
Is there a way to mount my drive. I had used the default option when installing ubuntu, so I have one extended partition and one root partition.

sorry - late.

Might be because a rescue boot enters runlevel 1 and not 3? And please be clear: which drive? What's the mount command? What does "unable to mount" mean? Got any errors?

Thank you unSpawn for your replies.
/dev/sda1 was the primary partition, which I could mount, but as I moved all the files, there was nothing in it. /dev/sda2 was the swap partition, while /dev/sda5 was extended partition, which had the data. I am not sure about the message now.
Anyways I have resigned to the fact that I have to repopulate my file server from my external backup and hunt for rest of the documents. I need those pdfs and documents for my referencing daily, so have formatted and reinstalled everything.

Thanks again

I don't understand the problem. You moved the files somewhere, so just boot a live CD, mount all applicable partitions, and move them back. Where's the issue?