Spark from desktop

B

Breathless

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I was turning my Power Mac on when all of a sudden a there was a pop sound accompanied by a spark that came from the bottom of the tower. I had my headphones and a gamepad connected to it already, but I highly doubt that was the source of the spark because I've always used those things. Now I'm worried. Has this happened to anyone before?
 
What kind of Power Mac was it? There are different things located on the bottom of different Power Macs.
 
It's a G5.

And now, my ENTIRE HARDRIVE just got erased! It's like I just turned my mac on for the first time! What the hell happened? I'm am really pissed now. Did that spark thing cause my harddrive to delete everything? Is there a way I can restore what was deleted?
 
Did it boot up? If it did boot up, then your user data should be "largely" okay.

It is unlikely that it would arbitrarily delete an entire user folder if you can still boot up the OS on the drive.

First things first. Does it boot up?
 
When you FIRST start a new Mac, you get the setup screens as a new user.
Is that what you see?
Or, do you simply see complete defaults (blank Finder with the default Dock at the bottom?
If the user is at default settings, then your data may still be OK, but simply in the Real user folder - and you can check to see what user folder names are in your Users folder.
 
If you're hard drive is completely erased, you'll get a finder icon flashing with a question mark.
 
It booted up fine, but I did not see any flashing question mark icon nor was I able to find my files. There's only one user in the system so there was only one folder in the Users folder. Everything is at default but it didn't startup with a setup screen.
 
If you didn't have the other potential problem (you should investigate that "pop" first), then a Disk Utility - Disk Repair would be your next step.
Your PowerMac G5 might be in this program - http://www.apple.com/support/powermac/powersupply/repairextension/

From what you describe, your hard drive didn't completely erase itself, as you wouldn't be booting. Your files should still be there, but a few corrupted preference files may have caused your system settings to rebuild, so it now looks like you are starting 'new', and if you only have one user folder, your files should be in that folder.
 
I did a disk repair and managed to recover my files, though some are missing (they might have been corrupt?). I didn't rename my home folder, so that's kind of strange. I still need to figure out what that pop/spark was but I guess I'll have to send it in for an inspection. Thanks for all the help!
 
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