[bobhenr]

Just wanting to know if anyone else has heard of this.

I recently bought a second generation 17" 1.8 GHz iMac with 512megs of memory. I got a good deal on the discontinued model and snapped it up. Its running os 10.4. I haven't had a chance to hook it up to a fast enough internet connection to download the upgrades.

This evening the computer went to sleep while I ate dinner, and when I returned and woke it, it was very sluggish. I managed to get the Activity Monitor open and saw that Safari was in a crash mode of some sort and I told the computer to go ahead and force quit the program. After that everything seemed fine. But when I reopened Safari it opened to the default Apple home page and all my bookmarks were gone. (This isn't a crisis, this stuff is backed up). So I decided to look at the console and see what the crash log showed, and it was completely empty. There was nothing there in the crash log even though I knew I had had a couple of programs crash over the last few weeks. I looked in my User Library and everything other than the default items was gone. The widgets I'd installed, everything. I knew I was in trouble when I double clicked on the Microsoft Office test drive (on a hunch) and it launched as a fresh demo. I get another 30 days when I should have had less than a week. Then I shut down and restarted, and my desktop reverted to the original layout and background.

I did not suffer a kernal panic nor did any other program have problems when Safari crashed. It seemed quite routine.

The system level logs indicate nothing special.

This is not a disaster right now but I would hate for this to happen after I was a bit deeper into this thing. I have to re-enter several serial numbers, be happy that my iCal didn't have anything important on it yet, reinstall my custom menubar items, stuff like that. All of my settings in System Prefs are gone, as well as a couple of custom control panels in that program. I would rather not have to go through this again.

I am associating this with the Safari crash but it may have been something else. But I have no logs to look at, so I don't know.

I realize this is the sort of thing that upgrades might have taken care of, but has anyone heard of this particular problem? I'd rather not have a repeat.

[f1000]

No, I've never had this happen to me before. Is it possible that you accidentally deleted your Home folder somehow? If you're a novice, you might not have realized you were doing something wrong.

EDIT: Don't do anything else with your system until others have had a chance to chime in. Maybe they'll know if you can resurrect your missing settings.

[bobhenr]

Originally Posted by f1000

No, I've never had this happen to me before. Is it possible that you accidentally deleted your Home folder somehow? If you're a novice, you might not have realized you were doing something wrong.

EDIT: Don't do anything else with your system until others have had a chance to chime in. Maybe they'll know if you can resurrect your missing settings.

I've been using Mac's for 20 years and I was intending to write a nice response saying I would never delete my Home folder, but it occurred to me to do a Spotlight Search and I found that I had accidently moved my Library into another folder inside my Home folder while organizing some newly transferred files. Even us old pro's can do stupid stuff.

f1000 thank you for replying and getting me back to looking at the problem. It is now solved and we can all go back to wondering how Intel chips will affect us.