weird crash

Hi, I was wondering if anyone could help me with this problem.

I'm a tech-novice here so please bear with me.

I have a 15in Powerbook Aluminum, bought it in the Fall of '04, running OSX 10.4.11. So, for awhile now my AppleMail has been cutting off the upper half of the letters typed into any emails that I've written. Minor, slightly annoying, but whatever. Then yesterday, I opened AppleMail and it acted as if it was the first time- made me re-register my accounts, reload all of my back dated mails,etc.- and in the process, everything I had open slowed to a snail's pace.Stuff starts taking forever. I started getting worried. Then I opened iTunes and nothing was there. I went into the iTunes folder through Finder, and all my music was there, but nothing in the acutal application. Hmm, I thought. What's going on here? I'll re-boot.... Bad decision. Now- and this is the weird part- everything in my iTunes folder is gone, my soulseek folder, gone, and my desktop, gone. Movies, Pictures, Documents, Applications, all fine. Music, desktop, vanished. Even weirder, the space left on my hard drive is the same amount (about 11gigs) as before this happened. So I have this feelings that it's all still in there, just invisible. I searched, nada. I did a disk utility, and got "Volume header needs minor repair," so I booted up from the install disk and repaired it. Alas, nothing had changed when I booted back up again. Same amount of hard disk space. Still no visible music or desktop files. Anyone know what's going on here?????

Thanks in advance,

vmcjr

Did you by any chance rename your Home folder? The one that comes under "Users"

holy crap. i sure did. i didn't even think of that. am i screwed? yeah, that's exactly what i did. what can be done????

Hmm. Very bad thing to do. However, since you say the space remaining is the same, your data should be there somewhere. Try this guide.

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/renamehomerecovery.html

thanks for these links. I will try this when I get home... Just wondering though, does this renamed folder issue have any connection to the 'volume header...' error (and by repairing the disk have i made things worse?), or was it just that that happened to be messed up coincidentally, and what about this AppleMail halving all my letters business?? thanks again. i hope it works!!!!!