"The system update went without indecent and the kernel compiled and installed without error. The next step was to reboot into the new kernel. When the kernel panic'ed, I figured that I had missed something in the kernel configuration, so I rebooted back to my older kernel, which also panic'ed. Since this system had been running not 15 minutes ago, I knew things were about to get ugly.
"At this point, I remembered that I had been doing some testing with an Ubuntu live CD, so I booted the live CD. At least now, I could get some work done, even though my workstation was "toes up." This would also give me a platform from which to work on my regular hard drive, or so I though. When I attempted to mount /dev/sda3, I was told that it didn't exist. Fdisk told me that my partition table was mostly gone! All that was left was /dev/sda1, where I keep my kernel, and /dev/sda2, which is where I swap. I posted a message describing my situation to the Gentoo user's group and was told that I should look into a program called testdisk"
