09-01-2009, 11:32 AM

Hello all,

I was foolish and did not back up all my data before an OS upgrade. Now I am in the unfortunate place of having lost nearly two years of creative work, due to some sort of User Profile issue.

I have just joined MacForums hoping to find some insight regarding my problem.

Here is what happened:
Last week my MacPro was upgraded from OSX to OS 10.5.6

Everything seemed to happen smoothly. EXCEPT when the computer restarted my user profile was gone and all associated files.

The computer had a total of five user profiles. Mine was one. All other profiles are fine. I even logged in under the Admin profile to see if my profile was locked or something. I searched for files that were mine. I looked under the User folder. I ran a string of code in "Terminal" that the apple support people gave me. And nothing.

I am convinced my data is there, I just need to get it back. The computer has not been used since this happened. I shut it down.

Before this happened there was evidence that something was slightly "off" with my user profile. Some days I could log in, other days I would have to disconnect from the internet to do so. Every other time I restarted the computer the monitor display would be shifted about 5" to the right. Every other restart the display would be fine. I don't know if this is related. It's just a detail that was odd so I wanted to mention.

My questions are two fold:
1 - has anyone else had this happen? what did you do?
2 - Could running Disk Warrior really cause more harm than good? Trying to assess difference between Recovery Software and the very pricey services offered by recovery companies.

Any insight to this is greatly appreciated.
Thank you very much!
-Lisa

09-01-2009, 11:46 AM

Lisa,

I think the data is also there, try a sudo ls -al under users to see if its hidden (in terminal) (ls -al will show all content) to move to the folder from terminal use CD /path/to/users

09-01-2009, 02:23 PM

Ok so I got bad rep for the above, so here we go...

Open up Terminal (which can be found in Utilities folder)
Type this

cd /Users/Profiles/

Then

ls -al

See if your profile is their under your username

09-02-2009, 04:17 PM

Thanks Andy.
Sorry, this is new to me, had to input text above a couple times to be accurate.
After typing in your recommendation I received a response of "total 32" followed by a list of 16 items. All use the admin's name which is how I am logged in. My name is not on the list, nor are any of the other accounts on this computer.
Do you know what this is telling us?

Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge with this.
-Lisa