My x.1.4 nightmare rather loong sorry

[techie]

greetings Mac osxers,

well my happiness w X is coming to an end real quickly.first, i am using it on an unsupported (PPC 7300/180 336 mb) machine so i take any bizarre problems with that in mind.ok now the problem,today,i decided to reboot my machine just to flush it out.upon reboot i logged in to my user acct(admin) and my desktop/apps/IE favorites were all set back to fresh install, then i look in my users folder and all my folders except desktop are GONE, i reboot just and do a /sbin/fsck -y in single user mode it says my drive appears to be ok.so i log back in srtill back to factory fresh settings,network settings are ok,all my updates are intact.i know enough about linux/unix to be very careful when using commands so i know i didn't do it.logged into root everything is goodso all i want to know is, has this happened to anyone else(regardless of supp/non supp comp) becasuse i lost weeks of reasearch,all my favorites, and all my apps.i got back ups of most except the favorites, but this has me seriously considering linux,or going back to windows.

good day

[lethe]

i have a hard time believing that the files are really gone for good. have you searched the drive for them? maybe your OSX just forgot where your home directory is supposed to be (it is possible to change this on purpose, and what you describe happened to me after i did just that)

[Jeffo]

I have been using X on an 8500 with a processor card upgrade and the install was a 8-9 hour process but it has been working great with no vanishing files like that. I highly doubt that the files are truely gone also. I would suggest to try to boot into classic if you have it on the machine and then look in your users folder on the X partition/directory. I dont mean to open classic in X, I mean to restart the machine into 9, even if it is off of a CD.

jeffo

[roger]

It does sound like the OS has forgotten where your home folder is, and has just created a new one for you elsewhere. Did you move your user directory away from the default? Hunt around and see if you can find the files somewhere.

Barring that, the only other thing that I can think of is a virus, but let's hope that is not the case.

R.