Xubuntu 20.04 disaster

[MR ZenWiz]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 1:56 PM Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>
:
>
> Do you mean that if you do
> ls /home
> you see nothing at all?

My apologies.  No, not quite.  Under /home there were an assortment of
.* directories, but all of the files I knewwere supposed to be there
were not visible, and all the standard directories (Documents,
Downloads, etc.) were also missing.

> Does the system have multiple disks or multiple partitions with
> systems on them?  Perhaps the system has somehow booted the wrong
> system.  Do you get a choice of systems on booting?
>

Unfortunately, no.  I had to reinstall this system from scratch about
5 months ago.  I was able to back up all the files and restore them
after the reinstall, but I did one stupid thing (or one too many...) -
I did not divide the disk into a separate home partition, which I
absolutely will do if I need to reinstall this time, or maybe just
anyway.

The good news so far is that I rebooted from my install USB stick and
all the files appear to be visible.  I am backing them up to an
external hard drive as I write this, then I can proceed with further
recovery, secure in knowing that her files are (almost certainly)
safe(r).

What bugs me is that the hard drive boot could not see the files at
all.  I'm not sure how that's possible.

Thanks.

Mark