Urgent help needed with 12" PowerBook G4

Hi everyone, this is my first post here, but I have lurked here before when I've needed to find some info.

I wonder if anyone can help me?

I switched on my PowerBook this morning, and found that my desktop had changed, everything seemed to have reverted back to factory settings.

But the most horrible thing I've discovered so far is that Mail seems to have wiped EVERYTHING. All of my emails, contacts, everything is gone.

My Safari bookmarks have all been reset too.

Documents seem to be OK, but it's like all of my applications have reset themselves.

Can anyone help? Is there any way of recovering my mail? It's absolutely vital to me that I get those emails back, I'm sitting here in tears. Doesn't look like I can get an appointment at an Apple store today either, and I desperately need to get this fixed.

What has happened to my PowerBook?! Please please please help.

have you changed anything since you last used your machine?

Also look in you Libary in your home folder under mail and see how many inbox files you have (if you dont know where this is just select the 'go' menu and then 'connect to folder' and copy this in there ~/Library/Mail/)

JulyK said:

Hi everyone, this is my first post here, but I have lurked here before when I've needed to find some info.

I wonder if anyone can help me?

I switched on my PowerBook this morning, and found that my desktop had changed, everything seemed to have reverted back to factory settings.

But the most horrible thing I've discovered so far is that Mail seems to have wiped EVERYTHING. All of my emails, contacts, everything is gone.

My Safari bookmarks have all been reset too.

Documents seem to be OK, but it's like all of my applications have reset themselves.

Can anyone help? Is there any way of recovering my mail? It's absolutely vital to me that I get those emails back, I'm sitting here in tears. Doesn't look like I can get an appointment at an Apple store today either, and I desperately need to get this fixed.

What has happened to my PowerBook?! Please please please help.

Click to expand...

Did it boot up like normal? Did you in any way accidently log in as another user? Is your username still there that you were using before?

Logged on as usual - I don't have any other accounts on here other than me.

The last thing I changed on here was tidying up some items from my desktop last night - literally moving files into folders. That's it.

Just spoke to a friend who knows a fair bit about Macs, and I've managed to find the emails stored on my harddrive as .emlx files and I am now importing them back into Mail, which is something - means I can go through and manually re-enter my contacts if needs be.

I'm wondering what other horrors I'm going to discover though...

Does anyone have any idea why this could have happened? I've had this laptop for a good few months now, never had any problems, and I just cannot think of what might have caused this.

(Thanks for replying, everyone - REALLY appreciate it)

Been racking my brain trying to think of why that might have happened to you, JulyK, but aside from human error, tampering, or mebbe software/hardware damage (which doesn't seem to be the case, since it still seems to work fine). Still, what happened to you has gotten me morbidly intrigued. If it's okay, I'd like to know what your findings are, when and if you finally figure out what happened.

Good luck with picking up the pieces, hope it goes well.

peayce.

JulyK said:

The last thing I changed on here was tidying up some items from my desktop last night - literally moving files into folders. That's it.

Click to expand...

OK, just to clarify.... what exactly do you mean by "tidying up"?
What files, exactly, did you move and to what folder? Did you create these folders yourself or were they existing folders?

JulyK, can you check the following please, if it's what I think it is then the fix is simple.

Open the Finder and go to your home user area (the one named after your username where things like thr Documents, Music and Pictures are stored etc). Open the Folder called "Library". Now look for a folder called "Preferences" and right click (ctrl-click) on the folder and select "Get Info". In the window that pops up, look for "Ownership & Permissions:" and tell us what it says for the option. It *should* say "You can Read & Write".

If it says No Access or anything else then change it to "Read & Write". Now log out and log back in. This may or may not be the problem, but I had similar symptoms to you and I tracked it down to this.

Good Luck.

(For those interested, in my case it seems for some strange reason the Preferences folder had its permissions changed so I had no access, so i couldn't even read the preference files. These files hold all your custom settings like window positions etc, if OS X can't access them then it defaults to the factory preferences, but all your files are still there).