Taskbar disappeared after updates & user dir missing???

[/RaspberryPi]

What title says. I had not updated raspberry pi for some time and I did it yesterday. After logging from vnc I noticed that taskbar was missing. I tried some commands I found on threads with similar issues but nothing worked. Today I run "sudo rm -r ~/ .config/lxpanel" and rebooted, but after that I could not login with pi user. I also tried via ssh(putty) and I got a message that said
Could not chdir to home directory /home/pi: No such file or directory
and I assumed that user pi directory is missing or not accessible. Now when I enter password I get black screen on vnc and the login screen pops up again to enter credentials. If I enter wrong pass it mentions that password is incorrect. Luckily, I changed the sd card with another one which had an older installation. At this time I don't have a card reader to flash or just view contents on the primary sd card. Any ideas of what is happening?
P.S:

• Also I tried

sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart
and the two lines below existed
u/lxpanel --profile LXDE-pi
u/pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE-pi

• I could also access "Preferences" > "Appearance Settings" because trash desktop icon was there.

I changed taskbar size and position from that options but didn't solve the problem.

submitted by /u/ganja7
[link] [comments]

More...