mackbook reset itself (and did strange things) when i plugged in an external harddrive.

Hi.

It all started about 2 months ago when i bought a black macbook duel prosessor with tiger 10.4.11 os.

i bought it from a friend who bought a new mac for himself.

our (mine and said Macbook) relationship started off well,

but yesterday i thought i'd treat her to an external harddrive to store music and movies in, the harddrive is a Maxtor touch 3 160gb.

when i plugged it in, it was fully formatted and set up to go.

i didn't do much more than plug it in and my mac started acting strange, not like refusing to do the dishes or anything like that, no, much worse!

she reset herself kind of like back to factory setting, i ran the disc utility thingy, and it told me i needed to repair my harddrive.

at this point i realised i dont have the CD's i needed to do this, as i forgot to get them from my friend (who is in another country now).

i borrowed said CD's from a friend and all seemed to go well, harddrive repaired it said to me...ok, great.

but on further investigation i noticed that i had to restart(?) itunes from the beginning.

now before all of this palavar my itunes was stocked up with about 600 podcasts, these have vannished.

but my harddrive is telling me that they are still in there due to nearly 100gb being used but not tracable.

(by tracable i mean, when i add up all of the space used, i.e music, photos aps ect the maths dosn't add up)

i dont have much music or fotos, maybe 40gb max. as i dont want to fill my mac up with stuff like that. (hence external harddrive).

also all my profiles and settings had returned to factory (this happened before the disc repair bit)

i seem to have lost my movies folder from in the side bar thingy too.

so to ask my question...

what the bloody **** is going on?

where did all the podcasts go?

why is there no space in my harddrive when i dont have much things stored in it?

how can i get said space back?

why did she reset herself?

can i unreset her back to how she was before?

and maybe more questions to come as i use her more and discover new missing things.

if you can help me, please feel free to do so as i don't want to file for devorse.

thanks in advance!

Daz