My computer crashed while upgrading Ubuntu. Long story short. I installed a new boot drive. My /home is still on the other drive. I installed GNUCASH on the new drive but I can't find my current data. I'm getting stuff that's 2 years old. I've gone to the GNuCASH site and looked every where on my other hard drive. I just used it two weeks ago. What's the secret. I think I had a version 2.4 something.

It depends upon where you stored your primary data which can be either a set of files or a database. Assuming you used a file store somewhere on your home directory. this might help --

The closest thing in ~/.gnucash files I see is a GUID and that doesn't help much. (but maybe you put your filestore there, too?)

so the easiest thing to do is to look for the filestore on your old drive. I assume you can still mount it so you can get to your old home directory? In a command prompt run
that's the find command starting at the current directory and all below looking for a file with "cash" in the name somewhere ignoring case. The gnucash file store has a series of files in the form of 'bookname.gnucash.timestamp. and log or gnucash. 'bookname' is whatever you called your financial books when you set them up. The most recently modified file doesn't have the timestamp. If this doesn't find any good candidates, you might try the same command from the root of your old disk to see what it finds. You might need to use sudo to get around file permissions.

Well, my data lives in a file called accounts.xac — the only files that have .gnucash at the end are the log files.

You seem to have lost all your hidden configuration cards (.gnucash, .thunderbird and probably .mozilla and many many others) when you left your home directory on the old drive. What is the path to your current home directory?
jdk

'find' doesn't work for me but 'whereis' does. I got a lot of stuff mostly manual locations.

---------- Post added 12-23-14 at 12:14 PM ----------

The old drive is still here. I can see everything that's on it.

and do you see .gnucash?
You need to use this command while you're in your home directory.
jdk

older version. no problem. just substitute xac for cash in the find command. You could also substitute 'accounts.xac' to hone down the find results but I find a search that is a bit more open is more likely to help me when I tend towards typos or memory lapses. Sometimes I redirect the output to a text file that I can then scan with gvim or another editor. i.e find . -iname "*accounts*" > accountfilesfound.txt'

whereis is to find commands, not data files. find will list any file matching the search criteria given with a whole lot of options about where to search and what to search for and how to list results.

use command 'man find' and compare to 'man whereis'

I spent 3 hours looking for those files. Today I found them.

Thanks for your help