Moved home folder Mayhem(imac acts like reinstalled)

[aplfan]

OMG I think I accidentally moved my home folder. I thought I put things right but as I listened to one of my itunes playlist it seemed to miss a few songs. There were big fat exclamation marks beside most of the tracks. I had this a couple times before so I thought that itunes was losing track of my library which is on an external 500G drive..... so I ejected the hard drive and restarted my imac(its a 1.25 GHz PPC G4 running Tiger 10.4.11).... I came back to a disaster I'm sure only windoz users can truly appreciate. Everything reset as though I had just reinstalled my OS. itunes was the first I tried to look at it acted as though this was the first day I bought the machine as did all the other "core" programs like mail and iphoto. I tried "showing" itunes the path to the music on my external drive and all it would do is sit there. I finally had to "add to library" and after some time the tunes are in itunes although none of the playlists are. depending how I search in finder my main document folder is empty or if I follow the path through "network" there are all my documents. the same goes for a folder that mysteriously appeared at the left of my finder column called desktop... if the finder is opened and I click on it is empty; follow the path through to what I think is the same folder (desktop>desktop(the folder)>(everything that was on my desktop before I messed up)??

I've looked around and moved some things around, everything is there from documents to music I just somehow made all the settings and access to data base information disappear... and now I've probably made it worse by "fiddling". Does anyone know how to get say your mail program to recognize prior settings(ie can I "point it" in the right direction and get my life back... the same with iphoto?? HELP please

 

[cyclingplatypus]

I did this to, you renamed the home folder didn't you? Do a search in finder for what you renamed it and change it back.

 

[AndyClarke]

Or just use Time Machine to go back to how it was!

 

[agentphish]

Both of those suggestions are very good.

If you can't get it back to snuff doing it either of those ways, you can try booting your mac in Target Disk Mode and hooking it to another Mac and then rearrange/rename your files that way, though you shouldn't have to go this far in theory.

Good luck