Froze on Startup...Forced Shutdown & Lost Everything

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New to the forums and have never had a problem with my mac. I have a Macbook Pro which is roughly a year and a half old. I have two accounts on the computer, a guest account and my primary account. The guest account is rarely used.

I started up my computer and accidently hit the guest account rather than my primary account. When the computer went to load the Guest account, the boot froze up (never actually went into Snow Leopard). I force shutdown by holding the power button, then restarted the computer. Upon startup, everything looked good. I clicked my primary account and logged in. When I logged in, my account appears to have reset and lost everything. The icons at the bottom of the screen all reset. I click my "Mail" and it asked me to setup a mail account as if my computer is brand new. I click "Itunes" and none of my music is there. I click "Iphoto" and nothing is there!

Did Mac just mix up my account with the Guest login? Did I lose everything!?
How do I access the harddrive to confirm files aren't missing?
 
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I just looked at my Documents, Applications, System folders and it literally appears my entire hard drive was deleted. The Mac OS X Info shows my hard disk has 175.94GB available out of 199.71GB, so it's quite obvious that I have officially lost everything. I guess it's time to get an external hard drive. Nothing to do now but cry.
 
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That... sucks.
 

chscag

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I just looked at my Documents, Applications, System folders and it literally appears my entire hard drive was deleted. The Mac OS X Info shows my hard disk has 175.94GB available out of 199.71GB, so it's quite obvious that I have officially lost everything. I guess it's time to get an external hard drive. Nothing to do now but cry.

If your entire hard drive was deleted you wouldn't be able to boot to OS X. Also it appears that you have 24 GB of something still there...

Before you panic and decide to do something like format your hard drive or reinstall, let's find out if the data is still there. Go here to download the demo of Data Rescue II. The demo will show you if your data is still there and if it can be copied to an external hard drive.

Depending on how bad you need your data back, (Data Rescue II is $99) you can decide if you want to buy the registered version of Data Rescue II or not.

Something else you might try.... Set up a root account on your machine and then boot to the root account to see if your data is there. If it is, it may just be a matter of transferring it back to your admin account. Read this Apple KB article on how to set up a root account: Link

Regards.
 

bobtomay

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My question would be, did you change the name of your home folder?

If not, see chscag's post.
 

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