[spiff72]

Has anyone ever had all of your Mac OS X user account spontaneously combust? As in disappear?

I originally posted about this in the powerbook forum (I thought my HDD was failing), but it now seems like it might be an OS problem.

Please see the following thread for a description of the problems I found:

http://forums.macnn.com/69/mac-notebooks/301156/unable-save-preferences-then-bigger-issues/

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Thanks!

[spiff72]

If you don't feel like following the link, the thing that I find really odd is that when I use the Password Reset utility on the Tiger DVD, it reports that there are NO USER ACCOUNTS on the drive.

[chris v]

You either have a corrupt Net Info database, or some sort of directory corruption that Disk Utility couldn't fix.

Disk Warrior will fix directory corruption if it can, but I'm not sure what to do to rebuild the Net Info database, if that's what it is, although I know it's possible under some circumstances.

[spiff72]

Originally Posted by chris v

You either have a corrupt Net Info database, or some sort of directory corruption that Disk Utility couldn't fix.

Disk Warrior will fix directory corruption if it can, but I'm not sure what to do to rebuild the Net Info database, if that's what it is, although I know it's possible under some circumstances.

Thanks for the reply.

If you read the other thread, you know that I have reinstalled the OS, but my backup partition on the firewire drive is still mangled. I haven't wiped it out yet, since I would really like to know what went wrong.

Do you have any idea what would have made both my PB and the month-old backup partition to do the same thing? This seems like a very odd coincidence.

I am trying to figure out if I did something harmful to bring this on...

Thanks