My iBook has lost my files! Need help!

Question

Yesterday I went to unlock my computer and the password box wouldn't come up all it showed was a spining color wheel, so I shut my computer down with the power button and restarted it. After I loged back in all of my files in my doc, picture, movies, and music folders along with my files on my desktop had disapeared. My hard drive still says the space is used up on my hard drive I just can not locate them anywhere. I have run disk utility and have not been successfull in recovering anything. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can recover/find my files again? Thanks in advance.
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

You can try and start the computer from the OSX installer disc#1 and
use the menu beneath the "Installer" by clicking on its name, to access
the part that says reset password. This may be a premature move, but
if you can find anything regarding your system before this, you may need
to see if you can do so by attempting an Archive and Install; and choose
to save your user permissions and information, so maybe a new system
could have your old account stuff in it. That may retain your old user folder.
Another idea (outside of the two or so packed together above) would be
to make a new user with Admin privileges and use that to see if the
system can be talked into finding your other files. Each user's files
have a certain inaccessibility from even an Admin's level of permissions.
I have and use OnyX software in my machines, and it does a
good job of keeping on top of system maintenance procedures
I am otherwise at a loss or too lazy to perform; it can do some
tasks to help clean up a system (but not wipe stuff) and keep
the time/date things working smoothly; and other tasks. I use it
a few times a month, usually when bored and the system's fine.
Preventative maintenance and repairing disk permissions can
help to keep things going well. Don't know really why, but it does.
[I know if/when the situation you have should arise in my computers, I
hope to have a working full computer hard drive clone available to go in
and irradicate the contents of the hard drive and replace it with a clone.
But any super-recent stuff would be lost unless automatic backups were
being made by a utility on the computer, making a backup to a FW HDD.
Mine do not have this last faculty. Mine is a full clone from a week ago.
Made manually, and when I did that, other utilities were run and the drive
was wiped, zeroed and reformatted; and the clone was re-cloned back.]
You may be able to see some "lost" files (but not open them) from a
new user account, by using a utility named What Size. This can find
things that take up disk space, and it also can delete things real easily.
It does not care what it deletes, but it can find things by size and location.