Due to my work's nature, I've been giving out some basic tech support. Someone came with a G4 iMac, claiming that all personal data were lost.
After questions, it turns out that this person reinstalled OS (I'm still unclear why it had to be re-installed as I'm told it was working fine prior to reinstallation).
I then went through the installation process to show how it worked; I told about "archive and install", but when we got to where we should choose this; I only got single button which said to "upgrade" and clicking this only takes us to actual installation process. Advanced options dind't give similar options. Seem strange to me that there wasn't anything to indicate whether personal data should be archived or not.
I've also done PRAM, disk permissions and repair.
I told them the best thing they could do is to either get disk warrior or pay a techie to recover the data, which I'm reasonably sure is still there; just that the directory isn't there or something like that and not to add or write over the hard drive in the meanwhile.
So did they forget to put in archive and install for the 10.3 (or whatever it was that came with G4), or did upgrade=archive and install?
If latter, then what could have caused all the personal data loss?
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