We just received our new mac and took it to the store to have the old files from our last computer transferred over. Now we can't find all our files. There was more then one user on the old machine. How can we find the files from the other users?

Question

We need to find where the files for the other user on the computer are now located.  There were two other users on the old machine, which was taken into the store and ALL files were suppose to be transferred over to this computer. HELP!

Answer 1

It appears what happened is the installer though it was looking at a empty drive and just went ahead and installed.
I of course am assuming here you didn't use Disk Utility to format the drive first before installing, that would wipe out your files and programs for sure.
So what to do, what to do.
Well there is hope for you as long as the drive wasn't Filevaulted.
I'll explain. When a hard drive writes data for the first time to a drive, it starts at the very top and works it's way down.
When OS X was installed the first time, it was at the top of the drive, unless you upgraded then the upgraded OS X could have been written elsewhere.
Now when you just reinstalled OS X, the new OS went on the top of the drive, overwriting any data that was there previously, so what was there you have lost forever which is about 8GB or so. If it was the previous OS there, then your more in luck because only the old OS X was overwritten.
The remaining space on the drive still can have a copy of your files, provided it's not overwritten yet.
It's because when a hard drive deletes data or reformats, it doesn't remove the data off the drive or overwrites it immediately, it's just made so it's SPACE is available for new files to be written there.
So technically one can recover the deleted data off a non-encrypted/scrubbed hard drive with special software.
The way it does this is it reads the 1's and 0's of the files themselves, and through a lot of figuring out, can tell what that file is and what it belongs too.
So what you will have to do is this:
Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive
or if you don't have the skills, then take it to a local PC/Mac tech and they can do a direct image of the drive and then you can run Data Rescue on it to rebuild your files.