What happened to /home?

[Rem P Roberti]

> 
> I hope you won't see something like
> 
>         % cd mnt/poly
>         mnt/poly: Not a directory.
> 
>         % file mnt/poly
>         mnt/poly: cannot open `mnt/poly' (Bad file descriptor)
>
That is exactly what I saw, and nothing worked to try and fix the
problem.  So, as I indicated in an earlier post, I ran fsck -y on the
/usr partition and was finally able to deep six /home.  No real
catastrophe because I had all of /home backed up.  So, I just did a 
mkdir of /home and repopulated it.  I'm still scratching my head as to
what caused the initial problem. There was no power failure or anything
like that.  I remember that all of a sudden when I booted the laptop I
got this message (I forgot to include this in my first post):

FreeBSD/.i386 boot
Default:0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader
boot:

Hardly the normal opening screen, and I had to hit enter to proceed.
First time I did that that the computer booted OK, the second time   
it broke.  The only thing that changed between the time of the normal
boot and the problem is that I installed a USB hub to this old Compaq
because it only has one USB port.  Who knows.

Rem