In a Debian-based distro (Ubuntu) I have had a corruption of my /home partition, which resides on sda4 of my Dell Inspiron laptop. Not knowing what to do, and with no way to boot and google the situation, I played Y, Y, Y to all fsck's questions. Now, /home is empty. I do have a backup from 4 weeks ago, as I backup the first of every month, but I have done quite a bit of work this past month. I'm very interested in recovering the data.

More info: This is a Dell Inspiron machine, 2.0GHz dual-core Intel processor, 2GB RAM, 80GB 7000RPM hard drive, ATI X1400 video. The disk is partitioned with sda1: 15GB /; sda2: 15 GB blank (Fedora was to go here) ; sda3: 3GB swap ; sda4: ~47 GB /home. I set these partitions a few months ago when I last installed Ubuntu. I had begun install of Fedora 7 when the machine crashed- I didn't get to the real install part. Upon rebooting (into Ubuntu), it complained something about inodes. I gave it the root password (yes, I had previously set a root password) and ran fsck (or something else resembling a rather unacceptable work, appropriate name by the way). A few Y, Y, Y's later I could boot the system. However, as soon as I logged into KDE I was returned to the login screen. I CTRL-ALT-F4ed into a terminal and logged in as root. I then cd'ed into /home, and ls showed that there was nothing there. I immediately ran shutdown -h and now that I'm home I'm writing from the wife's desktop.

Any help in recovering the /home/user directory, or even specific files therein, would be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Problem solved... The disk simply was not mounted. Valuable lesson leaned cheaply tonight... I'm currently burning a backup and reading up on rsync to prevent 'next time'.

Glad to hear it was just a mounting issue.

Rsync is invaluable, though this reminds me that I need more than an external hard drive for my data.