I'm using 11.10 (ext4) and somehow I've lost /home/myuserid. /home is there, but appears empty. I can boot to the login prompt and login as Guest, but when attempting to login as myuserid, I get routed back to the login screen. I can also boot into recovery mode via Grub, then to a root prompt. As both Guest and root, /home appears empty:

root@ubuntu:~$ cd /home

root@ubuntu:/home$ ls -al

total 0

drwxr-xr-x  1 root   root    60 2012-01-13 07:42 .

drwxr-xr-x  1 root   root   240 2012-01-13 07:42 ..

root@ubuntu:/home$ 

However, when I boot the computer with my Ubuntu installation USB, run from USB, and open Nautilus, I can see /home/myuserid is there, and all the files in it are intact. I tried recovering it using parted as explained on the Ubuntu Data Recovery page, but the rescue START END command didn't do anything (didn't even give a return code, just a new prompt).

It seems like I've just deleted a pointer in the partition table to the location on disk or something, without deleting the actual partition and files. Anyone know how to restore /home/myuserid?

PS - I've read through many of the threads here on this topic, but they all seem oriented toward restoring lost files, rather than restoring a partition table pointer to a user folder, or fixing a problem with a user folder not mounting correctly, or whatever it is I've done here. My files really aren't lost, I can see and open them just fine when running from the USB drive, and I'm hesitant to try recovery tools like PhotoRec when 1) they don't seem 100% reliable, and 2) I suspect the solution is simpler.

Edit: /home is not mounted now. Booting with the USB drive, which is what I'm doing now, does not automount it. And yes /home is on its own partition (as are /boot, swap, /, and /home, all on separate partitions).