home dir permission lost (set to "??????????")

[giacomella]

Hi all!
On my linux box at university lab i found my home dir permissions, ownership and modify date-time lost. On the last login to my machine I got the message

Could not chdir to home directory /home/ggrasso: Permission denied

The message didn't alerted me at first, thinking I could be able to face the question by myself. So i su to root and listed the /home dir to find the problem. Here comes the output:

??????????  ? ?         ?           ?                ? ggrasso

That's what really warried me! I had no first idea about what was happening... I tried a chown and a chmod hopeing it could have worked nevertheless. I was wrong: nothing changed. So I really don't know what to do.

Any suggestion?
...please...

[johkir]

It sounds to me like your directory is corrupt, which you may already know. That's why the permissions were denied last time. Unfortunately, there may not be much you can do.

Have you tried fsck?

If you boot from a liveCD, can you read any of your files?