Grub Rescue

My hard drive seems somewhat compromised. I have 120 GB PC that came with Windows 10 (2021). I initially dual-booted it with LinuxMX, but Windows didn’t play nice, so I just reformatted the hard drive, and stuck in 70 GB for MX, and left the rest spare - no Windows but their core partitions are still lurking in there.

Recently the PC laboured with Youtube and videos, (CPU maxxed out), and then yesterday it threw a wobbly and froze up. When I tried to restart it was grub rescue - a module missing, and one readable drive (ext 2). I gave up trying to fix it. I assumed at this point I had inadvertently done an “rm -rf / *****” , leaving a space, and thus deleted everything. (It just seemed the logical explanation at the time)

So I decided today to lick my wounds, and to come back to Fedora, which I used all through much of the last decade, and which is getting a lot of praise these days. I have installed it successfully but now I see that it has taken the remainder of the GB on my hard drive (3/40GB) , and MX is visible in the /dev folder, still taking up 20GB of its 70GB allocation. (So obviously I did not delete it)

I feel that I should take some kind of remedial action. I suppose something along the lines of:

  1. Retrieve any important documents from MX [no, I did not back my PC up]
  2. Clean the whole hard drive and reinstall Fedora on a clean base…

But I feel a bit worried, anxious and beaten up, and would like some guidance if possible