"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"
