| Let me go ahead and expand the information a little bit. I got the machine with the "fresh" install, and used it for about a week when I started to notice the oddities. I was planning on getting a new drive for it the whole time, I just hadn't been able to get it yet. Anyway, I tried resetting the pram and the open firmware, powering down the machine. I've run Tech Tool Pro 4, Disk Warrior 3, and any number of utilities to try to coax out some information. When I finally got my new hard drive, I wiped the old one, physically took it out of the machine, powered it down, started back up from cd, reset the pram, open firmware and the reset-all in open firmware. I even reset the pmu. I installed my new drive straight out of the wrapper, booted up from my OS 10.4 disk, and installed my OS. By that night, it was back.
Like I said, I don't want to seem paranoid, especially because I don't know the in's and out's of the Mac file system, but there are a few things that I have seen that are a little different from the examples I see on the internet. The open firmware seems to have a different structure than is shown in most tutorials, and the hard drive structure seems to be different as well. I'm not sure if it is possible that a directory structure has been written into some type of memory somewhere or something. Another oddity is that my battery just died.
The thing is, with physical access to a machine, anything is possible. Could they have set up the drive, stored a directory in memory and altered the power settings to go into sleep instead of shut down to retain the structure? The extra power draw would explain a dead battery. Anyhow, I appreciate any thoughts and if I can explain any further, let me know.  |