HELP. Not sure what has happened.

[newtusmaximus]

Thanks trinidad & Richard B.
A) gpart  did not solve the issue - repair - No files found.
B) Booted desktop from external usb HDD that has a fully working LL2.8 32 bit . Grub identified the desktop HDD (sda1) and chose earliest kernel present 4.4-077? recovery
Ran fsk? file recovery  than dpk?  and then finally continued boot from sda1. 

No luck..  still  barest LL - sudo password unchanged, can see main added packages, skype, dropbox  Mega etc  but to files.
Tried running system.log - lines galore but could find a means of printing out.

How can  I access the sys log  and save it so that I could post it ( somewhere? not to overload this forum's server) ) .  Perhaps from that someone could spare the time to see 1) What happened and b) if there is a chance of recovering the data.
Hope this makes sense -  Still very much a linux newbie - do idea what is under the "hood"
Thanks again