/home/user missing after `init 3`

#1

There were two administrators in the system: user and user1. I was logged in as user and I needed to exit the graphic mode and entered init 3 as root. Immediately after the directory /home/user disappeared.
I thought that it was dynamically mounted and entered init 5, but that just shown the “endless” logo. After rebooting it is also showing the “endless” logo and no login screen and /home/user is still missing.

#2

I just tried running init 3, it dropped me at a terminal where I could successfully login as my user account and browse /home as normal. After reboot it booted back up into the graphical environment and I could successfully login and user the computer as normal.

Is there any possibility that your /home directories were accidently deleted in a separate context before you ran init 3?

If you now in a state where the system doesn’t boot into a UI but you can login to a terminal you could post the output of journalctl -b to see if there are any explanations in the system journal.

#3

Thanks, but I can’t assist anymore. That laptop had a couple of other problems (unrelated to Endless) which finally bricked it and I’m not going to extract the HDD just to read the logs.

#4