Xubuntu 20.04 disaster

[MR ZenWiz]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 2:40 PM Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:
>
:
> Almost certainly the files are not gone.
>
> DO NOT REFORMAT!
>
Not unless there was no other option whatsoever.

> 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.
>
As I just posted, unfortunately not.  I used the default disk format
when I reinstalled the OS back in June.  I'll never do that again.

I never do that on my machine, but that's mainly because I run off an
SSD, which holds / and nothing else.  /home is on a separate, much
larger hard disk.

> 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?
>
I will try that when the backup is complete.

> 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.
>
I'll post them (and not let them get away) next time I boot the
machine.  I remember an fsck report, but there was more I don't
recall.

Coming soon...

Thanks!

Mark