So it finally happened. The first support call from the rents about their new iMac.

Something happend when they were reading email (Mail), everything disappeared (their email), none of the documents were there from when Apple moved data over from their windows machine, and front row launched and wouldnt go away. Nothing was in the trash bin either.

I have no freggin clue what happened, but they do have Time Capsule so Im sure everything is backed up.

The only recent changes were that I installed VMware with Vista Ultimate. I did allow the home folder to be shared in the VM, but thats the only remote issue I could think of that might cause a problem.

Any ideas whats up?

11/13/2008 8:59:54 PM

lulz

11/13/2008 9:07:29 PM

Quote :

"Something happend when they were reading email (Mail), everything disappeared (their email),"

when i hear something like this, i almost have to blame the user. Something similar has happened to my Grandfather several times - either he deletes a folder all on his own by accident, or he's looking at the wrong folder, or he goes into Preferences for some reason and disables his account, or something like that.

Now, i have no idea what your parents could have done, but I would be very suspect if they either did something without realizing it, or accidentally did something and aren't telling you about it.

Then you said "frontrow launched and wouldn't go away"..... are you saying the Mail thing and the frontrow thing are related? or they just happened at the same time? Pressing "Esc" wouldn't exit Frontrow?

Also - Mail has it's own Trash Bin. It doesn't use the System Trash Bin. Be sure to look in Mail's trash bin, over in the left folder view in the MAILBOXES section

11/13/2008 9:16:56 PM

Yea they hit something that launched front row and escape wouldnt get out of it.

I bet he didnt check the mail trash bin. I really didnt make that explicit. Im pretty sure its user error. They dont know much about computers and the Mac has been the most productive thing for them to date.

edit - I just spoke with him. It sounds like the whole system froze. The dock wouldnt even show up when he moved the mouse over it.

I told him to hard power it off, unplug it, plug it back in and reboot. That fixes the problem and all is well.

I havent ever experienced that with my mac so I was worried that it was something that happened through the VM's access to the home share or something.

Yeesh

[Edited on November 13, 2008 at 9:44 PM. Reason : .]

11/13/2008 9:41:16 PM

^ if the mouse was still moving, they may have just been able to log out and log back in, or try a force-quit (command-option-escape).

And they didn't have to unplug it (potentially bad for the HDs), they could have just held down the power button.

And I think it's apple-control-eject button to force a restart if the underlying OS hasn't gone down.

[Edited on November 13, 2008 at 10:27 PM. Reason : ]

11/13/2008 10:27:26 PM

Quote :

"And they didn't have to unplug it (potentially bad for the HDs), they could have just held down the power button."

I had him hold the power button until it powered off, then unplug it, plug it back in.

Its all working fine now.

11/13/2008 10:29:19 PM