Disk drive for /home is not ready yet or not present"

[WillemII]

Last week, when starting up my laptop it stopped with the message: The disk drive for /home is not ready yet or not present ... Eventually I get some error messages, and finally a sort of blank desktop appears. I have been running Mint 10 since it came out, without any sort of problems. Harddrive is 320G, home partition is approx. 280G.
Other than using Mint with pleasure, my knowledge about Linux is on the (very) low side.
Could anybody tell me what information I'd have to supply in order to perhaps come up with a solution?
Thanks in advance for any help!

[xenopeek]

Try booting from the Live image (DVD, CD or USB stick) and see if the partitions can still be accessed from there.

[WillemII]

Vincent, I have in the mean time edited my message, it is the /home partition we are talking about. I have run several live cd's such as Knoppix and System Rescue CD Live, which has several recovery tools, but I do not dare to use until I have good advise.
The partition can be seen but the filesystem is 'unknown'.
In the mean time I have hooked up the problem HD as an external HD with a sata-adapter to usb on my laptop with a new Mint 11 LXDE.
Groeten,
Willem