Mac OS X Lost user preferences

[floorshaker]

Hope someone can help with this. For no obvious reason, my intel Imac with 10.5.5 seems to have forgotten all my personal preferences, favorites, dock items, address book items and calendar entries - oh and email has forgotten me too!

All the folders seem to be in place, nothing's moved as far as I can tell. What's going on? Is this a common hic-up?

Thanks in advance.

 

[JediMeister]

From your description of the issue you may have renamed your actual user directory inside Macintosh HD/Users. To potentially fix it, follow the steps in http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1876. For future notice in the event that you did rename the home folder, don't do it again, or when creating the initial user account on a system make sure you don't have any typos...

 

[floorshaker]

in the local\users folder, there is the main admin (my account). within that account folder there is a subfolder, which contains all sorts of subfolders with mail/preferences/settings info etc etc etc

is this in the right place? or has it been moved?

can i simply rename this folder and re-boot?

 

[JediMeister]

In your user-specific folder there should be a few standard folders like Desktop, Documents, Downloads (if running Leopard), Library, Pictures, etc. If you only have two items in Macintosh HD/Users, yours and a Shared folder not sure what may have happened. If you did rename the home folder you would have 3 folders in that Users directory, 1 with a typo you tried to correct, the active one with an icon of a house, and that Shared one. Anyone else have ideas?

 

[floorshaker]

rathe than try and work it out, i've bought a minimax drive and will use time machine to recover in future, if it happens again. thanks anyway

 

[156457]

This happened to me once too... I just had to start fresh with all my preferences.