Well crap. I started this before your reply, and after rebooting I have no access to anything, It says there is no access to home and in tty fstab in unwriteable.I think I will have to try go in with a usb to save my files and then reinstall everything. Thank you for trying to help though. When I do reinstall, the information you provided should help me avoid the same mistakes.
That was a lot of your time and I am very grateful.
You have to edit it with sudo, of course â itâs a root-owned file. Either way, your files should now be on the other drive already, so not all is lost.
I will never question your patience. 
So this is the thing I did not do.
I wasnât too concerned, because I had everything important saved on a backup disk.
But I just tried to open that. Its a WD external drive I formatted with two sectionsâone for my laptop backups and one for my desktop backups. The laptop section mounts and opens fine, but the desktop says it cannot mount. Because, of course.
I tried to chroot from a live USB. I can see the drive where all mile files are, and I can see the folders, but if I try to open them they are empty. On filelight, it shows that there is a lot of data, so I know it is there. At this point what I really need to do is just recover that data somehow, and move it yo a different place. Can you help me do that?
Well, first we need to be sure whether the files are really all there, and not just the folders.
What happens when you try to mount it? And for the record, which partition are we talking aboutâŚ
/home partition (which you did not add to /etc/fstab); orâŚNo, you are right, the folders are empty. The drive used to be half full, now it is nearly empty. OMG. I really appreciate your help and boundless patience.
Well, crap. Nothing like a fresh start.Thank you again. I am off to buy a new backup drive and a backup drive for that one!
On a more cheerful note, gnome disk utility was able to repair my external drive and all but the most recent backup are available.
Thank you again I wish I could buy you and your whole family dinner! Seriously you are amazing.
Iâve been thinking about this some more, and I was under the impression that your system could be salvageable by way of the live USB. But itâs your decision whether youâd rather go for a fresh install or not. 
Thank you, once I was able to reclaim my backups, I just went ahead and reinstalled. Thanks to your advice, I was able to set up the additional storage drives exactly how I wanted them, quickly and without any trouble. Thank you again for all of your help!
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