Address Book- Lost a ton of contact info during "MERGE"

Question

Trying to “Bluetooth” contacts to my new phone and struggling a bit. Tried a few options with no luck, so I highlighted all contacts then clicked “MERGE CARDS”. This put all phone numbers under the “Apple Computer” contact, (I think it was the top of the list alphabetically), and wiped out all other information from my one hundred plus contacts. I then went to “EDIT” and clicked “UNDO MERGE”, and now the pinwheel has been spinning for about 4 days. I really need to recover my contacts and could use a little help. Anybody?
Thanks in advance,
Brian

Answer 1

Do you have a bootable backup of your hard drive, complete with all your current contacts? If not, you may be out of luck. Regardless, you need to Force Quit Address Book; it will not stop on it's own anymore, and you're probably in a kernel panic.
After you've done that, run Disk Utility to Repair Permissions, then insert your Mac OS X disc, restart your Mac and boot from that install disc. At the first screen, select your language, then choose Utilities > Disk Utility and use it to Repair Disk. When that's done, restart your Mac and boot from the hard drive.
Back in the finder, open Terminal and enter this command:
defaults write com.apple.AddressBook ABShowDebugMenu -bool true
Press Enter or Return, then quit Terminal.
Open Address Book, go to the Debug menu on the far right on it's menu bar and assuming your contacts are not there, choose "Revert From MetaData" and see if it will restore your contacts. If not, then your only chance of getting them back is probably from a backup you should have, or entering them all over again.
That's the sad truth, which is just one reason why you should always have a bootable backup of your hard drive at all times, and make a backup of your Address Book using the File > Back up Address Book… command whenever you make any change to your address book.
Mulder