I am running Ubuntu on my work computer. (Del)

Returning to work after a break the computer failed to boot but dropped to a root maintenance prompt. The operating system appeared to be okay but my home directory was missing. The fstab indicates that my home directory should be in /data but the drive seems to be gone!

The fstab looks like so
That last line should mount the /data partition where my home directory should be.

The blkid command shows no disk with the /data UUID
Its as if the disk with that UUID has been removed.
Is there a way to get the disk brand or manufacturer from the UUID?
Teh disk might be SSID is there a way to tell?
I wouldn't mind getting my files back. I find it hard to accept someone removed some parts.

Since this is at work, can you ask your IT department for help? If so, that would be my first step.

My second step would be open the case and inspect the hard drive bays. Of course, all the partitions could be on a single disk.

My next step would be to boot to a Live CD/USB of something and take a look at those partitions using the Live CD/USB's tools.

As an aside, I find it curious that your home partition would be mounted to "/data." In every case in which I've set up a separate /home partition, /home has been the partition name.

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It probably just failed (to startup) or has a bad spot in the superblock so the UUID isn't found anymore.
Look into the output of dmesg or whatever log file of the startup (after the message daemon has been started) your distribution writes its output
(in my distribution it is /var/log/messages, but especially with systemd distro's that will be different).

My IT department is in the throws of restructure and out-sourcing.
Management is in love with Windows so asking central IT for help with a Linus question is like asking help from Stalin.

I disassembled the computer and there was only the system disk.In general the /data is often mounted (local standard) as a separate partition where the home directory is placed. The /data partition is sometimes a separate disk or ssid device.

My question is; can I get information about vendor or device type from the UUID referenced in the /etc/fstab
It might be solid state disk, I don't know. I am perplexed by its "disappearance".
Are there any sugestions other than "ask your system administrator."

lsblk will tell you if there are several partitions on that disk. Perhaps you find one that is unused. It would be a candidate for closer inspection.

As far as I know, the UUID (there are several UUID formats, actually) is mostly generated from information that identifies the computer, such as MAC addresses, and a timestamp. I don't know if the algorithm can be reversed. Have a look at the wikipedia article about UUIDs.

Use dmesg to see if your system sees the disk, & to what it is assigned.

If it doesn't show up in the dmesg output, it isn't being seen at startup.
In which case you will need to check its physical connection, may be loose wiring, or just dirty electrical contacts.

If it does show in dmesg, try mounting it manually, (could be /dev/sdb1).

No, not really as the UUID is generated from multiple input data, including the date/time the UUID was generated.
And as someone else already remarked: you can have a partition UUID (PARTUUID) and file system UUID's, which are much longer and guaranteed to be unique in the world.
From a website I found:
On the other hand, PARTUUID's are not affected by reformatting the partition (with the same or another file system), UUID's will change then.

It isn't obvious from your posted fstab file that you have a separate home partition or that your data partition is on a separate disk.

Its possible that your home directory is some kind of network share that is being mounted via something else besides fstab file.

Posting the output from the fdisk -l will show all partitions. And as posted your problem might be cause by a corrupted filesystem or failing hard disk.

I looked at one of the other machine to see its set up.

Running the command blkid shows the dev name e.i. /dev/sda1 and any UUID associated with that dev id

On Ubuntu /etc/fstab uses UUID rather then the dev name. I had assumed the UUID was an actual hardware device buty apparently not necessarily so.

So, my desktop had a single disk and was partitioned.
Sadly the partition with my files on it has been corrupted and has disappeared.

fdisk shows no other partition such as /dev/sda2

I tried fsck but it has failed to recover any partitions.

Unless someone knows some other magic I give up on restoring my files and will return to my backups which are few days old so I have lost some work lost but oh well, these things happen.

fsck repairs filesystems but it isn't a recovery tool. There are several recovery tools but it is not an easy process since your dealing with entire filesystem. If /dev/sda2 is missing for no apparent reason I would make sure the drive is healthy by checking its SMART status (smartctl).

UUID is a unique number assigned to the file system. These days persistent naming based on the device ID i.e. /dev/sdx is not guaranteed.

You really want to go through your logs to find the names of the devices mounted in the past.

If /data was on /dev/sda2 then that is clearly not a separate device. You won't have two physical sdas at the same time.

If /data was on /dev/sda2 then there was no second drive, only a second partition. On the other hand, if the logs show /data on /dev/sdb1 and that is no longer present, then you probably have a drive missing. Other references to sdb1 could be a usb drive-- but if usb mounted as /dev/sdb1 in the past, that also implies there was no other physical drive.