[chasg]

Hi All,

Under the heading of "strange OSX tricks", I turned on my desktop machine today (a G4/500) to find that OSX (10.2.4) had "reset".

My desktop pictures were back to default, my Dock was back to default (with the default Apple apps put back in, like "Mail", which I had removed).

Stranger still was the palettes in the apps I have checked are reset (like Photoshop and Illustrator). I _did_ have a saved palettes location for Photoshop, but it's no longer under the "Workspaces" menu, and my meticulously put together set of custom Actions are gone.

I had some small apps up in the menu bar too, and now they're gone.

I'm sure that there is more wierdness to be discovered, but it's quite a jolt to have my carefully modified interface go kablooie (excuse the technical term :-)

What in the world has happened? (and no, I haven't accidentally logged in under a different login, as mine is the only one).

Help?

Chas

[philzilla]

did you run out of disk space? this kinda thing can happen then.

[chasg]

Hmm, that may be it. _just_ had PShop bleat that the scratch disk was full (I never use my boot disk as scratch, but now that everything has reset...)

only 135Mb on boot disk. Excellent pointer, thanks!

Umm, so will I get everything back once I free up disk space on the boot disk? (hope hope)

Thanks again for the pointer,

Chas

[philzilla]

Originally posted by chasg:
only 135Mb on boot disk. Excellent pointer, thanks!

whoa there! that's just not healthy. you shouldn't have less than 500Mb, if you can help it. if drive space is low, trash all those useless apps that you installed, but never use. that sort of thing. also, don't aim for a world-record-beating uptime, because you're just adding swapfiles to an already bloated drive. shut down, rather than reboot. it seems to clear all of them. maybe use a cache cleaner app too

[chasg]

Hey philzilla,

Yeah, 135 is a little low (was a surprise, lemme tell you). It's a 115Gb drive, and it filled up sneakily when I wasn't looking (over the last few months).

One thing I really hate about OSX is the new desktop directory structure. I'm talking about the fact that the "Desktop" folder is only on the boot drive (well, in my login directory).

I have four drives in this machine, and each had its own desktop in OS9. This is my only major complaint with OSX (or is there a way around this?).

I do shut down this beast every night, and I run a cache cleaner regularly (my ibook, on the other hand...)

BTW, I answered my own question: after freeing up a few gigs on my boot drive, all of my meticulously arranged custom prefs and other arrangements _didn't_ come back. Arrrgh!

Thanks again,

Chas