Help! I lost everything

How's everyone doing. Ok, I guess I'll start from the beginning. Everything was fine till I came home from work one day and restarted my macbook and it wouldn't go past a blue screen. After several restarts and increasing frustration I decided to reinstall OSX. I had done this before and everything transferred over but this time nothing did.

I wouldn't mind that much but I had over 30 GB of music and tons of pictures I would like to have back. My HD still says I have the same remaining space as I did before the reinstall so I would imagine that the files are there somewhere but I just have no idea how to find the. All I really want is my music and picture.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

If the machine was stuck at the blue screen that may indicate there was a problem with the hard drive. Reinstalling the operating system usually does not fix it. If you can boot the machine and get into OS X, your files should be in a folder called "Old Operating System" or some such. You didn't mention which machine you have (year, model) or what operating system is installed. If you were using Snow Leopard, it automatically does an Archive and Install when reinstalling the OS.

You also need to learn how to use Disk Utility to trouble shoot your hard drive and repair errors. See the following LINK.

I hope you learned the valuable lesson of keeping a backup of all your files on an external HDD.

I'm on a intel core 2 duo. Mac OS X 10.4.9. I got it back in 2007. I had leopard before I reinstalled, now I think I'm back to tiger. I ran the disk utility and don't think it changed anything.

Thanks chscag for your help but I still wasn't able to locate my music or old OS images.

MYmacROX said:

I hope you learned the valuable lesson of keeping a backup of all your files on an external HDD.

Click to expand...

No kidding haha. Ironically I have one and just never used it.

ghanson89 said:

I'm on a intel core 2 duo. Mac OS X 10.4.9. I got it back in 2007. I had leopard before I reinstalled, now I think I'm back to tiger. I ran the disk utility and don't think it changed anything.

Thanks chscag for your help but I still wasn't able to locate my music or old OS images.

Click to expand...

If you clean installed Tiger over Leopard, then it's likely your files were not saved. Do a Spotlight search and see if you can find anything that looks familiar.

Ahh well hganson89, as noted Mac author David Pogue says repeatedly concerning failed hard drives - "There are only two types of computer users, those of us who have lost everything and those who are about to."