Woah where did my HD go?

exactly the same just happened to me, and its just my luck i hadnt made a backup since 11th august. So annoyed now, in the process of restoring from time machine, but have lost loads of my work on here due to this fault.

What would they do if I contacted them about this, would they know what to do, or offer any other help with this.

Its so annoying, losing lots of work I'd done and hadnt printed off yet.

sorry to be annoying and bump this, but anyone know what to do if i can get the files back. quite urgent.

rogerss wrote:
exactly the same just happened to me, and its just my luck i hadnt made a backup since 11th august. So annoyed now, in the process of restoring from time machine, but have lost loads of my work on here due to this fault.

What would they do if I contacted them about this, would they know what to do, or offer any other help with this.

Its so annoying, losing lots of work I'd done and hadnt printed off yet.

sorry, but if you don't have a recent backup there is probably nothing you can do at this point. this is why it' important to back up regularly. you could try data recovery software like Data Rescue II or Filesalvage but it has to be used immediately after discovering the issue because otherwise your old data is very likely to be overwritten by new stuff. I didn't see your posts till now so didn't suggest this earlier.
what you and others who ran into this SHOULD do is complain to Apple. this is an awful bug and it should be fixed ASAP.
https://bugreport.apple.com
you can call them also if you like but they won't be able to help at this point either.

oh well its probably overwritten then......
I am doing that filesalvage thing anyway, but its taking forever.

and i would report it, but on that bug report thing,it puts all my address and phone number on it, whats that for..

First - Snow Leopard's default is that the MacHD does not show on the desktop. There is a check box in System Preferences to "show internal HD on desktop".

Second - I accidentally logged into my Guest account this week and it, too, was taking a long time to connect. So rather than wait/walk away, I clicked on my account icon on the screen, which stopped the Guest log-in. When I went to my account, the desktop screen was reset to factory and ALL DATA WAS GONE. All applications functioned as if it was the first time they were run (email setting up new email accounts, etc). I was able to recreate this on my Mac and Apple Engineering is now working on it. Moral - backup, and disable Guest until they fix this!

rogerss:

did the filesalvage thing work for you to recover anything?

I just had this nightmare just happen to me as well. Thing I'm most concerned with is recovering old archived emails that are no longer accessible (some financial records would be nice to have back too).

it managed to get some of my music back (but i had that saved on my phone anyway! )

but it didnt get back any of my word/pages documents that i needed.
it got a few but they were from months and months ago.

i didnt use mail, so cant say for sure about that.

Just to gather a few more bits of info on this problem, do you have your account data on a separate partition to your OS? I noticed that someone else reporting a similar problem has this configuration.

Also, did you upgrade your existing installation, or was it a fresh install?

Hey,
I've posted details of my encounter here which has some details of my system if it helps:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2194729

Well i did the same i accidentally logged into the guest account and then logged out and noticed that my background picture was different and folders that were on the desktop were gone then i click on my hard drive and some of the icons disappeared i click on them some of them came back but not documents but all folders had nothing in them i go to time machine and my backup got all the document and stuff but my iweb domain stuff wasn't there and wasn't in backup for some reason it disappeared i had to create a whole new site! But my itunes library and iphoto library where fine at least

i was mad but nothing hurt me to much i agree with the person who said if this hasn't happened to you yet and you have a guest account from leopard to snow leopard disable account wait a few days then recreate it that will solve everything (i hope)

FYI: This is NOT just an SL issue with the guest account... I had the same thing happen to me with Leopard 10.5... when I called Apple they said they had never heard of it happening before...Oh really?

As soon as I saw that people were having trouble with the Guest account, I disabled it. Funny thing, even though it is disabled, it still appears intermittently on the login screen. Sometimes when I boot it is there, sometimes it isn't. I recently changed the system preferences to "Display login window as Name and Password" rather than "List of Users". I haven't had any trouble.

Well, i haven't had the pleasure of losing my info on my computer, BUT...my computer kernel paniced yesterday while doing a time machine backup, and when i restarted the computer....my time machine backup drive was gone..

I got an error message that said "This disk could not be read from" with 3 options "Initialize", "Ignore", or "Eject"..

So initializing it will open Disk Utility, and in there - my once created partition for Time Machine was gone, completely.

I had to initialize it (create a new partition), before the drive would appear on my desktop, and am now doing a backup, but it is backing up my entire computer harddrive, and everything that was once on my time machine drive is gone completely.

I don't know if there are any similarities to this or not, but in a way it's funny because i just read about this guest account thing yesterday, and yesterday is when my Time Machine backup drive got erased from the kernel panic.

So i called apple today, and told them about all of this, and also mentioned the guest account issue that everyone else is having....and of course all they can tell me is they are working on an update and it should be fixed in 10.6.2.

I'm not creating a new issue just to explain all of this because i'm not looking for help, i'm just re-initializing it, and re-doing my whole time machine drive - i just wanted the rest of you to know that whatever the problem is that is erasing everyone's computer, also erased my time machine backup drive. But i have not had the pleasure of going into a test account to lose the info on my computer.

I am not sure if what happened to me this morning is exactly the same as what is going on here...but i solved it by downloading disk warrior 4.2 and running that while booted from a separate external HD.

I walked into work and my computer was hung...so i fussed around and it seemed to be ok. I then tried to move a file into my applications folder and received a message that i did not have permission to do that.
Logging out and then logging in and my password did not work...nor did logging in with any other accounts on the exchange server.

I panicked because i had just read about this problem with 10.6 last night.

I installed 10.5 onto an external drive and booted from that...and could see my original volume but most of the folders were empty...again panic.

I was able to copy my "user" folder to the external drive...and then i ran disk utility to repair disk and it would not repair and said something about "invalid key" and then would not allow my to mount the volume...i was just about to wipe it when i thought i would try disk warrior...

downloaded that and ran the rebuild and everything is back working perfect...knock on wood.