Help - disaster recovery

[Phil]

Thank you for reading this,

I have done an incredibly stupid thing after a fresh installation of 
Kububtu. Instead of copying my backup files I moved them to the new OS 
and due to a second blunder I deleted a KDE file from the new 
installation and now I cannot log in and I no longer have a backup. We 
suffered a power interruption before I had a chance to make a new backup 
plus the temperature has been up 45 degrees C for the past two weeks 
which has been very tiring. Losing 13 years of work, e-mails passwords 
etc is very destressing to say the least.

After spending most of the day searching Google for an answer I'm no 
further advanced and this is where things stand at the moment.

I used photorec in an attempt to cover my backup files from my USB 
backup drive. This resulted in two further problems:

1. My internal hard drive (on a second older laptop) is nowhere near 
large enough to hold the recovered files. That system also failed to 
reboot because my home directory was full - I managed to solved that 
problem.

2. The recovered files have nonsense names such as f1234.txt, which can 
be almost any type of file and there is likely to be thousands of them.

Using the KDE Partition Manager from the live dvd I found that the file 
system is corrupted.

/dev/sda3 ext4 mount point "/media/and a long string of digits" is 
readable and seems to be the / directory.

/dev/sda4 extended no mount point - this could include the /home 
directory and possibly /usr/local.

Also included under /dev/sda4 is a large unallocated block and 
/dev/sda...(can't determine the digit) a FAT32 block which is a second 
partition for Vista which is also readable.

Vista seems to be intact but I cannot log in because grub is corrupted.

There should have been three ext4 partitions plus a swap.

Naturally I'm very keen to recover my home directory and any help will 
be greatly appreciated. It seems to me that the best option is to 
recreate the corrupter partitions on the laptop with the Kubuntu 
installation.

Looking forward to receiving some good news.

--
Regards,
Phil