[tlug] Hosed my home directory

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Dave M G writes:

 > I tried to go into the home directory and create a directory called 
 > "mythtv", but it said that it was a "read only filesystem".

You have two problems (at least).  First, you don't have /home
mounted, and only then are you lacking a /home/mythtv directory.  It
won't help to create /home/mythtv on the root partition, it will
become inaccessible when you mount the home partition.  (In theory you
could have /home on the root partition, and then mount the other
partition on /home/mythtv, but that's not what you wrote.)

 > So when I try to boot the machine, it gives me all sorts of warnings and 
 > mayhem about not finding home directories. When all is said and done, I 
 > end up at a command prompt.

[[ I never fail to be amazed at just how robust Unix is. ]]

At the command prompt, type

mount -n -o remount,rw /   # / must be declared in /etc/fstab
mount /home                # /home must be declared in /etc/fstab
mkdir -p /home/mythtv

However, I suspect there's relevant information you didn't tell us.
If the partition is formatted and contains the right kind of
filesystem, you shouldn't be getting warnings about missing home
directories at a stage where an error can leave you with only the root
filesystem mounted, and that read-only.  It should be harmless to do
the above, but that may not be enough to achieve sanity.

Once you've got / mounted read-write, do dmesg > /tmp/boot.log
immediately.  Those error messages probably will get written to
/var/log/kern.log or somesuch, but it's worth ensuring that they get
preserved.

If (as I suspect), you do not achieve total bliss at this point,
please post that log, and the contents of /etc/fstab.