my configuration is lost...

[broke]

all I did was a reboot, suddenly all my configuration is lost.

all my applications in the dock is gone. It seems like im running osx for the first time. iphoto can not find my photos, itunes had to organize my music libary again. My PGP disk is gone, even though the encrypted file (disk) is still in "Documents".

Whatever program I run, it seems like I'm running it for the first time. I have to do all the initial config again...

is there an easy way to fix this ?

[macworks]

Sounds like you might have some file system damage. It might be best to take it to a Mac specialist that can run some software-level diagnostics on it for repair.

I know that you'd rather fix it yourself, but there's a delicate balance that comes into play -- namely your data. If you're data is more important to you than fixing it yourself, seek professional help.

Otherwise, you could try booting from the installation disk and run Disk Utility's repair function on your hard drive and see what comes up. Then run Disk Warrior and/or TechTool Pro.

The trick is in knowing how to respond to the results of running these tools.

[eric2006]

It sounds like you re-named your user folder, and OS X created a new user folder because it could not find the old one. What folders do you see in /Users ?

[broke]

I do not think so... All my files are intact. Everything is inside /Users/broke, which is my user account.

Killer-Looks:/Users broke$ ls -la
total 16
drwxrwxr-t 9 root admin 306 Oct 17 10:02 .
drwxrwxr-t 30 root admin 1122 Oct 17 09:59 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 broke admin 6148 Aug 8 17:45 .DS_Store
dr-xr-xr-x 3 broke broke 102 Jan 10 2006 .broke
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Mar 21 2005 .localized
drwxrwxrwx 26 FTP FTP 884 Oct 9 21:03 FTP
drwxrwxrwt 5 root wheel 170 May 11 00:06 Shared
drwxr-xr-x 46 broke broke 1666 Oct 15 20:22 broke
drwxr-xr-x 13 marimyhr marimyhr 442 Jul 2 23:20 marimyhre
Killer-Looks:/Users broke$ cd .broke
Killer-Looks:/Users/.broke broke$ ls
broke.sparseimage

[macworks]

Well to me, that says there's two home folders there one that is not encrypted and one that is. Perhaps your account lost it's affiliation with the File Vault image for your home folder. I don't use file vault and never have, so I don't have any suggestion as to how to resolve this.

Perhaps you can mount the sparse image and copy all of the contents into your plain home folder and see what happens. If that works, you'll just have to enable File Vault on your home folder again.

But you might want to hold out for better advise from someone who knows File Vault better than I do.

[fryke]

I don't think he's using FileVault. At least that's not what he said. He said PGP encrypted disk image... My guess would also be a renaming of the home folder or something like that...

[Lt Major Burns]

i would third the speculation that you renamed your home folder recently.

[macworks]

Okay, I just conducted a test and found that when I created an account with File Vault on, there was not .username folder in users. Instead, there was the normal user name folder with the File Vault image located inside of it.

That leads me to conclude that somehow your home folder's File Vault image was moved for one reason or another. Here's what I would do:

1) Create a temporary new admin account on your computer, call it "test" if you like
2) Log out as you
3) Log in as test
4) Open the /Users folder. Rename "broke" as "broke.old". Rename ".broke" as "broke" -- you'll likely have to enter the admin username and password to do this.
5) Log in as "broke" and see if all of your stuff is back. If you're not able to log in or your stuff IS NOT there, undo the changes.
6) When finished, you can delete the temporary admin account you created in step 1.