all my files are gone, i've tried almost everything

[cfrazier162]

last night i turned on my macbookonly to find that all of my files were missing, i rebooted, and did a little research, and found no solution. so i finally posted something on here this morning, so far i have tried disk repair and repair permissions in disk utility, tried rebooting in single user mode, tried manually entering code in the terminal, and rebooting with my mac os x install disk and running disk repair, but nothing is helping! It seems that Macintosh HD is fine when i run disk repair and whatnot, but I have another volume named "Users" that has my two user accounts within it, and that seems to be the problem. In disk utility it is not bolded but kind of greyed out and when i click on it and try to repair disk it gives me an error. it also says "not mounted" and when i click on "mount" it does nothing. Someone please help me i am running out of things to try to fix this. I know the files are not gone, because i downloaded a demo version of data rescue II that scanned my computer and i saw all of my files there-just that i can't retrieve them unless i buy the program, which i can not afford right now.

i've attached a photo of the info on my "Users" volume from disk utility.

Thank you!,
Christen

 

[igarden]

Christen:

The same thing just happened to me. In my case, It's as if I created a new user. Every personal preference is gone. My desktop picture, my dock, everything has changed to the factory defaults.

Is that what you are experiencing?

Cindy

 

[Giaguara]

/Users should always be present on the root level of the hard drive, and that/s where ther user accounts should be located. So if there seen to be more accounts than before then maybe these may be helpful
Return to default desktop, apparent "loss" of home directory and Mac OS X: How to change user short name or home directory name

Is there still a /Users folder in Macintosh HD (or however it is called in your system)? :-/
I've never seen it detach /Users to a separate volume ... did you have anything like filevault on or do anything that might have touched the location of that folder?

 

[igarden]

After several hours of looking at my files I realized that (without realizing it) I had somehow moved my Home folder into the same folder as Applications, Library and System. (I really need to pay more attention to what I am doing.) The OS automatically created a new Home folder (with the same name to fill the void I left) as well as new (required) subfolders. Thus my computer was able to boot, but it was an empty landscape compared to all the files I had before the mishap. By moving my Home folder back into the Users folder I was able to restore everything. It required renaming the OS generated Home folder to something else before putting my old Home folder back where it belonged. then restarting.

Thanks for the help. I hope this post will help others who may have a similar problem.