After a mysterious deletion of files, ubuntu 10.04 LTS will not start..The computer boots, and then it paused on the ubuntu logo where the dots change colour. It looks like start-up does not complete.

[sang69]

I was updating from terminal, when the update manager suddenly proped up, in the middle of typing something.... The next thing i saw it was deleting everything from the system, python, firefox, everything. When it finished, it had freed about 85MB. It then couldn't update, or upgrade. And after a restart, I couldn't even get to the login screen:
When i restart, i get all sorts of errors including

Init: Failed To Spawn Readahead-collector Main Process: Unable To Execute: No Such File Or Directory

Not starting jetty- edit /etc/default/ jetty and change NO_START to be 0

unable to start /usr/share/Denyhosts/denyhosts_ctl.py No such file or directory

when i run live cd i get errors such as

Could not import rumpy module

/usr/lib/update_notifier/update .... not found

/etc/update-motd.d/oo-header:4:lsb_release not found

When i chroot to /media/6ba7b561-aac0-47c3-9134-0ac8992501e4 - this is the filesystem where my files are

and

do apt-get, i get this:

root@ubuntu:/# apt-get update
Get:1 http://ppa.launchpad.net lucid Release.gpg [316B]
Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/firefox-stable/ubuntu/ lucid/main Translation-en_US
Get:2 http://security.ubuntu.com lucid-security Release.gpg [198B]
Ign http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security/main Translation-en_US
Get:3 http://archive.canonical.com karmic Release.gpg [198B]
Ign http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ karmic/partner Translation-en_US
Get:4 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com lucid Release.gpg [189B]
Ign http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/main Translation-en_US
97% [Working]FATAL -> Could not set non-blocking flag Bad file descriptor
E: Method http has died unexpectedly!
E: Sub-process http returned an error code (100)
root@ubuntu:/#

The partition where my files are has an fstab file, the contents are as follows:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
# for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
# devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=6ba7b561-aac0-47c3-9134-0ac8992501e4 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=038117cf-f5e2-4ae0-a44a-a0ca0237a586 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults,noexec,nosuid 0 0

The last 24 hours i've struggled to get this going, could someone please help?
Further, I like ubuntu, have been using it on and off for 3 years now, but its been quite a hugely disappointing journey. Surely it would have been better with some live support.

[sang69 (snkhwazi)]

and i forgot to mention that im running a live cd of 9.10, karmic koala