I erased everything on my mac by goofing in Terminal.
In Mavericks I have been struggling with spotlight taking over my mac on every reboot for 20-30 minutes. Tried everything and had been experimenting with Terminal commands found on the web. I don't remember the command I used but it was supposed to delete the VT-100 index or something like that. When I typed in Terminal, my elbow was bumped and something went wrong in Terminal - some of the text was jumbled around. I tried quitting but it said something was in progress. Later I quit to the Finder, and all seemed well but no spotlight rebuild. A short while later, spotlight kicked in so I figured I've got 5-6 hours to let it run. When I came back, the mac would not recognize my password. Somehow it finally let me in, but when it did the screen was unresponsive. Mouse, keyboard, nothing. So held down the power button. After rebooting I was greeted with my choice of 3 Recovery Partitions. (I have a one internal with 2 partitions and another internal SSD, so 3 made sense.) But no drives. I ran Disk Utility and was happy to see my drives there. However I was horrified when I saw my 1TB drive showing as having 980 gig free.
I booted into Single User mode and it seemed to get a lot of Disk is Write Locked errors.
All the drives show up on the desktop, one drive is completely blank, the other (with the 2 partitions) one is blank and one has a small system on it, with my username….how did it erase everything and keep the user account? And yet delete everything everywhere else?
I’ve run various recovery utilities, and I know my data is there because it recovered a lot of files, for example 7,000 Indesign files with filenames 001,002, etc. Not very helpful, but it’s something.
Anyone have any idea *** happened? Or how I can get my data back, in a way that is useful? I seem to recall in the OS9 days, Norton would reconstruct a directory based on the files, rather than scavenge/reconstruct. I wonder if anything like that would work. Any help would be much appreciated!
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9), 12,2 mid-2011 27