Xubuntu 20.04 disaster

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2020-11-19 at 13:46 -0800, MR ZenWiz wrote:
> Since then, nothing works, in either kernel.  The system only comes
> up in emergency boot mode, and a df check shows that the /home
> filesystem is completely empty - all her files are gone.

Almost certainly the files are not gone.

DO NOT REFORMAT!

I'll bet large amounts of money that /home was a separately mounted
partition, and when you boot into emergency boot mode those extra
partitions are not mounted so you just have the empty directory.

Emergency boot mode is DESIGNED to just get you to a minimal system,
and it's even good that it doesn't mount other partitions (just to be
sure they aren't a problem or won't become harmed).

If you run something like:

   cd /
   sudo mount /home

does it work and do the files come back?

Then the question is why the system doesn't boot properly.  To know
that we'd need to know something about what messages you see before it
refuses to boot and dumps you into emergency boot mode.