MBP hung on login, restarted, & now 60 gigs freed up, wtf?

[emperoroflove]

Hi,

So today, I turned on my macbook pro like usual, but accidentally clicked guest account. It sat there trying to load into it for several minutes, so I held down the power button till it shut off.

I then turned my MBP back on and logged into my normal admin account, though when I did I noticed that my settings and preferences had been reset.

But somehow it went from 20 gigs available to 80 gigs available, I figured it was a permissions error, so I ran disk utility from my snow leopard cd, repaired the disk and reset the permissions.


and those 60 gigs lost were files for my business / clients / work / school. Only things left are my applications and itunes folder. My apps when run, seem to be running for the first time ever.

I was/am running the latest version of Snow Leopard.

I don't know what else to do, or why this happened. And no, I hadn't backed up in a while. Not these files, everything else, yes. The stuff that isn't quite so super important :/

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

So today, I turned on my macbook pro like usual, but accidentally clicked guest account. It sat there trying to load into it for several minutes, so I held down the power button till it shut off.

It is never a good idea to force a computer, especially a UNIX machine, to turn off unexpectedly. More than likely, data concerning the Guest User account was being read and/or written to the /Users folder for the initial Guest User login, and you interrupted that process violently (to put it gently!). There's no telling what the computer was in the middle of reading/writing, and therefore, you may have borked more than just the "Guest" folder in the /Users folder by doing so.

You have four options:

1) Restore the data from the backups that you (will from here on out) keep religiously.
2) Send the drive itself to a professional data recovery service and prepare to empty your life savings in cost.
3) Try your hand at "home data recovery" with a program like Data Rescue II.
4) Cut your losses and go on with life, vowing never to do that again.

That's pretty much it. There is a slight chance that your original files and stuff have been preserved under another folder in the /Users folder (though, very unlikely because you mention so much space being "freed" upon restart). Check there and see if you can locate the data. If not, close your eyes, say a prayer, and randomly pick a number between 1 and 4.

The moral of this story is that there is nothing so pressing and immediate that you must interrupt the computer to get it done, because the consequences of such action are much worse than simply letting the computer sit there for 10 minutes and do its thing.

Good luck, and let us know if there's anything from here on out we can try and help with!