Recent content by gulliver

I hope you had a happier time with the mouse than I did with mine - wiping my drive and starting over. ;-)

Thanks. That's a really clear and comprehensive answer. Where were you last week in my hour of need when all files on the desktop vanished? I never did figure why? ;-)

Thanks - that makes it much clearer. Appreciated. ;-) Having now corrected my stupidity and realising the difference between 'repair permissions' and 'repair disk' am I correct in assuming that when I decide to 'repair disk' I'll save time in running fsck from single user mode rather than...

Thanks, Bob. You answered whilst I was editing my post having worked it out. ;-)

UPDATE... Ignore my post below - I think I figured it out. 'repair disk' and 'repair disk permissions' are different and hence the Disk Utily message 'to repair the startup disk boot from cd' doesn't apply when repairing permissions. ------------- After a recent 'disaster' incident...

Thanks for the help, all. Appreciated. In the process of swapping things, I also switched to Thunderbird - wonder if that's good or not.

Perhaps I missed something in the Apple Mail help files, but... How do I easily save my mail and prefs for easy re-install or move to another machine? With Outlook Express on OS9 it was simple to dive into the 'documents' folder and extract 'identities' - anything similar on Mail...

>perhaps the permissions on the Desktop folder aren't right -- try a permissions repair via Disk Utility... I repaired after the first loss - an hour or two later the incident repeated, so seems unlikely to be just that. I'll try the alternate user account.

UPDATE... Happened again... sorting through the recovered files, deciding which to keep and which to trash... organsising them into a bunch of folders on the desktop... poof! Gone. Again. The desktop is idiot-proof... to have done this inadvertently I'd have had to have command+a selected...

>...and make a backup! Immediately! Working without a backup is not a good thing to do. Thanks, mom. A salient point is that the 'lost work' was today's - not older stuff. Does anyone backup every hour? ;-)

Yep. Literally. Coding in BBEdit... checking in Firefox... closed/opened a tab or something and then clicked back to desktop to re-edit file and all gone... there were a good few folders/files scattered around. I can't see any key combo I could have accidentally hit to trash them then and...

Thanks - but... already tried before I posted. Some of the items have 'recent' aliases - but the originals can't be found. A root-through the trash was my first action - not there. A restart did nought. Neither did permissions repair. DiskWarrior shows differences... but all the MIAs...

All the files/folders (except the HD) on my desktop have vanished. Just instantly gone. Suggestions appreciated. (And no, I don't have recent backup.) All the HD stuff is fine - just the work in progress on the desktop.

Thanks. I hadn't thought of that - I'd had prior problems and had hence replaced the OS about 3 times in the past week (trying to eliminate an issue with updates/bad RAM/whatever) that about 5 minutes after my post I simply decided to haul it out again and start over. By target mode I was...

I'm suspecting hardware - though don't see how. The problem usually arises within a couple hours of activity and is always cured (for a couple hours) by an immediate restart. The restart suggests it's not a heat-related issue and as the machine isn't physically moved whilst restarting also...