[goalstone]

Fired up my 17" 1.33Ghz pb tonight and when the desktop loaded it was like a brand new machine. All my custom settings have reverted back to the original default settings. The dock was back on the bottom rather than on the right where I last left it.

My e-mail settings have all been erased! ical is empty! All my address's are gone! Bookmarks in Safari-poof- gone! I'ts as though the pb reset itself!

I installed Panther last week and everything was fine until tonight!!!

Anyone have any thoughts about this?

Appreciate any help.

[dtriska]

How much free space do you have on your hard drive? Once you hit only 250 MB free, any app that you quit won't be able to write its preferences out, and you lose your settings.

[goalstone]

I think, if i'm reading it right it says I have 273mb free

[dtriska]

Yes, you need to free some hard drive space. Try to keep at least 1 GB free.

[goalstone]

I thought you were talking about memory. On the hard drive I have over 60 gigs free.

[neoTony]

Were you using FileVault? Did you tell it to reclaim unused space?

Unfortunately, if you answered yes to either of those, things are not so easy to fix...

Here's how I fixed it the three or four times that it happened to me during the prerelease builds:

1. Copy your filevault (it is usually in the /Users/{yourusername}/.{yourusername}.dmg) to another drive - ensure you copy it to a filename that the finder will let you see (not a dot in front!);
2. Go to security and turn filevault off (seriously, it's borken, don't use it!);
3. Log back in to your account and open the filevault you copied elsewhere;
4. Check your files on the filevault archive. Generally, my mail was corrupt when it occured - and some of my prefs too - so be sure to check before you start copying stuff back into your non-encrypted home dir.

5. Cry. FileVault is fantastic, but the resizing of the archive (cleaning up unused space) appears to have not been tested so well. Hopefully Apple will fix this ASAP, otherwise there are going to be lots of angry mac users out there!

If you are using FileVault, don't use the reclaim free space option on logout. The home directory is contained on a sparseimage that can size up to accommodate more files, but cannot (of it's own accord) downsize. Personally, I'd recommend you turn it off until apple says they've fixed it.

This was a major reason I wasn't convinced that 7B85 wasn't final. I was wrong, but this is definitely a showstopper bug...