Weird dock happening. I'm nervous.

[rinseout]

Hi - I use a 12" iBook G4 1.2GHz. I have FileVault turned on for my account.

Anyway, today I logged out and back in again, and suddenly a few weird things have happened:
- My Dock has reset itself to the default settings, there's even an iMovie AND iMovie HD entry, although the iMovie icon is just a question mark.
- Skype forgot who I am (had to retype name and password), and it "registered" with Growl which I haven't seen since I first installed Growl a long time ago.
- My Firefox extensions are all gone. I updated to 1.5.0.7 today, but I've never lost all my extensions before (they don't even show up as "disabled").
- I was having trouble mounting a disk image ("codec overrun").

I'm not sure what has precipitated this, but need advice whether this is a sign that something is about to go terribly wrong, or if its just random weirdness or what. Aside from the Firefox upgrade, the only other odd thing I did today was install the DivX components for QT, but that seemed to complete successfully.

It isn't so much the symptoms that worry me as what they might be signalling. AFAIK I have plenty of drive space (32.39 GB avail, I have an 80 GB disk).



Thanks....

 

[mkrishnan]

Here are some things you should try...

1) Try to verify and/or repair the FileVault disk image containing your home directory.

2) If that doesn't help, you might read this thread.....

EDIT: In response to your question as to whether this issue is serious... I think it could be if it heralds corruption in your FileVault disk image, because the more you continue to use the corrupt disk image, the more likely you will lose other, more important data....

 

[rinseout]

Thanks for your help. I am going to verify the disk image tonight when I get home, after I run a backup.

 

[rinseout]

Update.

I ran the backup and then verified both the disk and the Filevault image with no problems.

But as I started using the computer again, I noticed other terrible things had happened beyond just the dock weirdness. My iPhoto library was badly corrupted; I rebuilt it, but lost all of the photo metadata, roll information, albums, and slideshows. It refused to rebuild until I had renamed two of the index database files, so they must have been quite badly corrupted.

I had maybe 1000 photos, and I will never be able to recall all of the details about them that I had in the titles and comments. It will be a huge inconvenience to set about putting them all into albums again, and a big loss to have permanently lost the descriptions of my photos.

Also one of my iCal calendars is corrupted, probably beyond repair.

I have no idea what happened to cause all of this, but I'm not happy.

 

[mkrishnan]

Mmmm... okay, I have to ask the loaded gun question now. Certainly Filevault should work for you without this much trouble. But do you have a really good reaosn for using it in the first place? You will not have any of these problems if you don't use Filevault.

Filevault is usually fairly stable, but because of the nature of how it works, it is sort of like a Flash keychain drive -- it is very sensitive to how you treat it, in terms of the disk being mounted and unmounted and writes finishing. When things get interrupted, the disk image can start to get corrupted. I'm really surprised your FileVault disk image passed a verification. It did, right? Green text, no errors?