Preferences gone, iphoto crash, help!!

Question

Hello All,
I've had my Powerbook G4 since 2004, and updated to Tiger 10.4.9 from Jaguar 10.3.9 about three months ago.
Today, I came home from work to a seemingly fine working machine. I closed the lid and brought it with me to Panera for some dinner, opened it up to get online, and was shocked with what had happened in 15 minutes.
I use Drag Thing for an extra dock system, and I found that all of my programs that were shortcuted in Drag Thing suddenly not in the docs. The apple doc had moved itself from the left side of the screen to the bottom, with ALL of the programs I've been using in the doc suddenly not there. In their places are programs I dont use, or have never used. It appeared how Macs are shipped, with the default icons.
Firefox's bookmarks are all erased. iTunes told me my library was corrupted. iPhoto crashes upon starting (it doesnt even fully load before it 'quits unexpectedly'). iCal has lost all of my calendars. Office 2004 tells me that it cant find the default templates when I open saved documents in both word and excel.
Expose' needed to be customized, I needed to change my daily schedule of waking/sleeping, and my widgets preferences are all set back to the default. All of the folders and their contents in any finder window (from my applications folder to my external hard drive) are scattered about, as if someone picked them up and just 'tossed' them onto my screen.
I am very nervous. Luckily, I have backed up all of my documents, pictures, and music to an external HD. So data loss is not a huge concern. But, what bothers me is how did this happen? It was sleeping for maybe 15 minutes, and then BAM! It pulls this stunt!!
What do I need to do to solve this issue? Its as if someone, while my computer was sleeping, deleted all of my preference files for EVERY (and I emphasize EVERY) program installed on my Mac....from iChat, iPhoto, iTunes, to Photoshop CS2, Office 2004, and Firefox, and Thunderbird.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.9)
Powerbook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Answer 1

The commonest cause of these symptoms is when someone decides to change the shortname of their home account. Doesn't sound like that's the case with yours however. Have you booted from the install disk and run Disk Utilities? If not do so. It will be in the menu bar--close the install window, go to the menu bar, located Disk Utility, launch it, and run both Repair Disk and Repair Permissions. If it reports errors it cannot repair you will need to buy a copy of Disk Warrior. Also, just how full is your drive? How much free space do you have left? You need 10 to 15% of free space. Thus, if you have a 60GB drive you would want to always have 6 to 10GBs free.
Also, it sounds like you do not have a proper backup. Do yourself a big favor and buy a an external disk to make a backup. You will want a clone that you can boot from, and that you can backup your files to regularly. Do a search here in Apple Discussions on backup for extensive advice.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder