[Nicko]

imac revA
OSX 10.2.5


I restarted my imac the other day to discover that EVERYTHING has been reset to default as if there was just a clean install of the system. Mouse movement back to default and the dock's settings are set to default including the default apps! Even my mail has been nuked, settings back to default and my in box is empty!
Strangely the wallpaper is the same, so that didn't change...

All this begs the question,
What happened?

Luckly I have 9.2 on another partition, and it seems to be working fine. So I haven't lost any documents or programs. This is so weird.

I thought that it might have been the battery, but that doesn't explain why nothing is out of order with 9.2 running....

Any ideas? I tried logging out and logging back in, that fixed nothing. Ideas?

[MjP2]

This topic was discussed here a couple of weeks ago. I had the same problem, too. The reason seems to be that you haven't got enough free disk space on your hard drive (less than 1 GB or so).

[ShotgunEd]

1GB should be more than enough. In my practical experience if you have less than 250Mb of free space just after a restart then you should try to free up some space, especially if your swap partition is the same as your boot volume. I'd recommend SwapCop to everyone. Moving your swap to a seperate partition can avoid running out of space on your boot volume and pesky problems like the one described in the original post.

Monolingual is also quite good for freeing up some space if you don't use particular languages built-into OSX.

[Nicko]

Wow I think this is the problem! I have OSX on a 2.5gig partition .... I think I'll go delete some files. Thanks for the link to those utilities as well, they should help alot.