[sclug] Help! (with a big 'H')

[n.a.haughton@bigfoot.com]

Help!

Last night I took a deep breath and allowed my sweetly running Ubuntu 7.10
installation to upgrade itself to 8.04.

Big, big mistake. I now have a very broken system.

Firstly, it has 'lost' a partition with all my data on it. I had a symlink
called 'data' in my /home/me folder pointing to /media/hda10, where I had
/dev/hda5 (reiser fs) mounted,


ie /home/me/data -> /media/hda10 -> /dev/hda5

 and that was where all my data was stored, leaving just the usual config
stuff in /home/me.

The arrangement worked fine for 6.04, 6.10, 7.04, 7.10. Unfortunately now
/dev/hda5 has vanished - that is, there are no hd? devices to be found in
/dev. Not only that, I can't make head nor tail of the 'new' /etc/fstab. It
looks totally alien to me (something to do with using UUIDs or something). I
was quite familiar with the 'classic' fstab arrangement but this new UUID
thing has thrown me.

As a consequence of all that, my wireless driver is unreachable so I have no
wireless internet, Thunderbird will not start (probably looking for the
.thunderbird folder which has also vanished), and Firefox has lost almost
all of the installed themes and extensions because they are not compatible
with the 'new' 3.0b5 that comes with 8.04 (if I had known that a beta
browser was to replace the previous one I might have thought twice about the
upgrade). There's probably more but I'm not going looking for it just yet.

All in all not a happy story, and I'm not best pleased with Ubuntu, but
that's another story - but can anyone help me get my old data partition
back? It's not something I want to just write off.

Any sysadmin type person out there who can guide me out if this fix will be
much appreciated. My /etc/fstab file is attached, in case that offers any
clues, and the /var/log/messages extract for the period of the upgrade
process.

Neil.