My Documents missing?

Question

Yesterday when I got home from work, I went to turn on my imac g5 and it got stuck at the Apple logo screen with the spinning gear, and the fan noise was extra loud. This happened with my ibook last year so I was in a bit of a panic, but, with the help of this forum I got it started up in single user mode and then ran that fsck thing. So, that seemed to work, except then when it rebooted it asked for my login. I never had my computer password protected on login before, but figured the password would be the same as when it comes off of screensaver. But when I put in that password, it told me it was incorrect. When my hint popped up, it was the same hint. I know i was not forgetting my password. It has always been the same, I never change it. So. I took the install discs and used that to change the master password. It worked and my computer started and everything was fine, except all of my folders are missing except for my applications. My documents, pictures, music.. they're all gone. And the clock on the top right corner of my screen is gone as well . And all of my bookmarked pages on Safari (and all my settings for internet pages, ichat, my desktop wallpaper, etc) and now Firefox isn't working at all. I did a search for something I knew was in my documents and it came up in finder and I could view the file, but it just doesn't show up unless I do a search. Is there any way to get everything back to normal? I'm not sure if the problem came from resetting the password, or from running fsck. Thanks!
  Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Answer 1

Hello,
Sounds to me like you are logged-in as an Administrator, and that your files are in a different "User Account".
Go to your hard drive, and make sure that you are in the "Hard Drive" folder. Not a user folder. If you are unsure of your location, click on the picture of the hard drive in the left-hand column of the window.
Now, go into the Users folder
See if there are other user-names in there.
If there are, try browsing through those user accounts and see if your files are in one of those.
If so, then you may try one of two options:
Option 1) Just copy everything from that account into your current account.
Option 2) Setup that user account to work.
To use Option 2, go into the system preferences (under the  menu). Then, choose "Accounts".
Find the account with your information in it (if it's there) and give it a new Username and Password.
Then, exit out, and try and log-into that account with the new Username and Password.
Now, if the previous user had been deleted, then you could using the information in this article to restore that user account:
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=482338&seqNum=2&rl=1
You'll see how to create and delete user accounts.
You'll notice that when you delete an account, it keeps the user account, but stores it in a disk image.
My thought is that if your old account is stored as a disk image, then you may be able to use the methods in this article to restore that account from the disk image.
Anyway, that gives you some things to try.
I hope this helps.
Let us know if you have other questions.
P.S., if you'd like, go ahead and click the "Helpful" or "Solved" buttons on any of the posts / replies above if you feel they were helpful or adequately answered your question.