[Ryøkan]

My daughter has a G4 iBook, running OS X 10.3.7, plenty of RAM &c.

One day, everything was fine. She packed it up to carry on a plane. When she tried to start it up later, everything in her "Home" folder was GONE. Music, photos, documents, mailboxes, internet settings, etc. -- all evaporated. Other users' stuff wasn't affected.

It boots up OK, but it's like a new machine -- nothing there for the main user.

In Finder, in her Home folder, it just has default folders (Desktop, Documents, Library, Movies, Music, Pictures), and they're all empty, except for default sub-folders. . . EXCEPT there's also a greyed-out icon that says "shona.sparseimage". (Her name is Shona.) It's got 4.82 GB on disk; Created about 5 months ago, and modified a few days ago -- when the crash hit. 4.82 gigs sounds like it's got all of her stuff, but we don't know how to get at it.

I've tried running disk utility, then from an external disk; also f-sck and Disk Warrior. No change. That's the limit of my technical expertise.

A friend said something about "file vault" corruption, but he didn't know how to fix the problem.

Any ideas? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[Tsilou B.]

Try these instructions:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25695#

[Tsilou B.]

After you have repaired the sparseimage file, you can log in as "Shona" again, and the files should be back. If Disk Utility repaired the sparseimage file, but the files are still gone, log in as the other user you created for the repairing process and double-click the sparseimage file to mount it. Then you can backup all important files.
If Disk Utility cannot repair the image file using Apple's instructions, but you really need the files, you'll have to copy the sparseimage file to an external drive and send that drive to a data rescue center. Tell them you need the files from the filevault encrypted sparseimage and tell them Shona's password. They should definitely be able to rescue almost all the files. It could be quite expensive, however.

[Ryøkan]

Thanks for your help.

Before your reply, I had searched Apple's site and found the link you recommended. I believe we've tried what Apple suggested, with no luck.
We'll try it again to be sure.

Hard to accept we may have to resort to data-recovery; it's so tantalizing, seeing that file with 4.82 GB -- it's all right there. But if that's our only option, I guess I'll have to learn from my daughter how important her files were.

Thanks again,

--Ryøkan