First off I am running a mid 2008 Imac with osx on it. I am having a very weird issue and for the life of me I can't figure it out so any ideas would be a great help. First off I will start by saying I was fucking around on my virtual install of xp yesterday and ended up installing a virus, I knew it because of some crazy startup errors and the removal of desktop icons. So I just uninstalled the virtual drive thinking nothing of it. Well today my wife was using the mac and all of a sudden all the icons on the desktop bunched together on the top right of the screen and a dialogue box popped up saying 8000 files were being moved. I canceled that and rebooted the machine.

After reboot the machine is crazy slow and I figured out that all my pictures have somehow ended up on my desktop even-though I can not see them. If i open a finder window I can see the pictures there, but the majority of them are zero in size. I can try to delete the pictures manually but I get a "file is in use from another program." and have to click continue every-time.

Finally, and I know the issue already, but I said fuck it and wanted to restore to a time machine backup point from before I fucked around in xp. Low and behold the disks I have for this imac were not the ones in the box. I had to replace my original machine a month after getting it and got the newer imac that came out but was told by the apple man himself that install disks would work.

I know this was alot of words, but any ideas other than getting ahold of those install disks and going back in time? Thanks.

ps. I also ran a antivirus program on my mac and found nothing.

8/22/2009 12:48:00 AM

I was with you until

Quote :

"Low and behold the disks I have for this imac were not the ones in the box. I had to replace my original machine a month after getting it and got the newer imac that came out but was told by the apple man himself that install disks would work. "

care to expand on that a bit?
What "disks" are you talking about? OS X install DVDs? Extra hard drives?

8/22/2009 8:41:01 AM

What version of OS X were these old "disks" for?

8/22/2009 10:00:29 AM

The disks were the install disks. And they were for 3 imac generations ago. Today I got ahold of 2 generations ago imac install disks and got my time machine to restore from last tuesday.

Also I figured out that my wife clicked select all in the media bar in pages and moved all our photos to the desktop. So no virus issue. I tell you this like you actually care, but the moral of the story is give your wife a secondary non admin account that you can easily erase and start over if she fucks it up.

8/22/2009 11:05:40 PM