PB crash - total data loss after forced restart.
Hello,
Ironically I was trying to back up a whole bunch of stuff the other day to and from external hard-drive (inc 5000 photos!) when I decided to start up itunes I had a message in German saying itunes needed to be updated (the OS was accidentally installed in German by technicians after a hard drive replacement last year, but I was running it in English) the thing is I was not online at the time and it wanted to update to a version dated 2007 so the first alarm bells started ringing. I did not allow this weird update of itunes fearing I would lose all my folders etc. and cancelled it. Then thinking I would eradicate the problem by restarting the PB when I tried to restart it wouldn't let me saying 'mirror agent' was preventing a restart. I left it for a while but then forced it to shut down. When I restarted it all my data / software etc was gone - it was all in German and like the 1st day the OS was newly installed!! (Icons huge, screensaver blue swirl etc) Everything except a few folders. Also it said only 5GB of hard drive - and it is 120GB hard drive.
What should I do?!! Can I try starting it from installation disk and use disk doctor or something or should I head straight to an apple technician?
I THINK the OS was 10.4.3 or around that mark.
Any help HUGELY appreciated! Thanks in advance and greetings from Berlin.
very worried,
Nicole.
Ironically I was trying to back up a whole bunch of stuff the other day to and from external hard-drive (inc 5000 photos!) when I decided to start up itunes I had a message in German saying itunes needed to be updated (the OS was accidentally installed in German by technicians after a hard drive replacement last year, but I was running it in English) the thing is I was not online at the time and it wanted to update to a version dated 2007 so the first alarm bells started ringing. I did not allow this weird update of itunes fearing I would lose all my folders etc. and cancelled it. Then thinking I would eradicate the problem by restarting the PB when I tried to restart it wouldn't let me saying 'mirror agent' was preventing a restart. I left it for a while but then forced it to shut down. When I restarted it all my data / software etc was gone - it was all in German and like the 1st day the OS was newly installed!! (Icons huge, screensaver blue swirl etc) Everything except a few folders. Also it said only 5GB of hard drive - and it is 120GB hard drive.
What should I do?!! Can I try starting it from installation disk and use disk doctor or something or should I head straight to an apple technician?
I THINK the OS was 10.4.3 or around that mark.
Any help HUGELY appreciated! Thanks in advance and greetings from Berlin.
very worried,
Nicole.
Powerbook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.3)