Beth Ernst wrote: >Ok, guys, I have been working on Macs for over 12 years now and thought I had >seen my share of weirdness, but I have never seen this happen. > >At one of our remote locations a user called me to complain that they were >having problems with their machine acting strange. They tried to reboot and >got the flashing question mark. They then ran Tech Tool and got the machine to >boot, but when they went to use Suitcase it said it couldn't find the >application. That's when they called me. I popped on the machine with Network >Assistant and when I clicked on the hard drive icon I was surprised to find >that many of the system files as well as some files from various applications' >folders were residing at this level. In addition the entire Utilities folder >was gone. (which is where Suitcase resided) In all when looking at the hard >drive there were over 5,000 items listed at the main hard drive level which >should have been located elsewhere. I checked the view options, this was not a >case of all the folders being expanded or viewed other than by name. The user >said that when she ran Tech Tool it told her there was a problem with! ! >the system. > >Is it possible the machine did this itself? Outside of something really freaky >going on with the system, I'd suspect someone was playing around but I don't >want to accuse anyone if it is possible that a corrupt system could have >caused this. Anyone ever had anything like this happen before? The machine is >a blue/white G3 running OS 8.6. > >By the way, my co-worker's home machine is back up and running after the help >you guys gave us on straightening out his system. I've suggested he backup his >info and partition his drive though if he plans to continue running both OS 9 >and X. Thanks for your help on that one. I'm trying to get my company to buy >me a new machine and OS X so I can work with it. > >Thanks! >Beth > From the way you described the situation, I would say it's the result of a utility program gone mad. With that many files at the root level there has to be a bunch of empty or missing folders. If they want to persue this further, I would suggest trying to find a common denominator among those relocated files. The only thing I can think of, off hand, is none of the files were labeled.
Personally, I wouldn't dedicate any time to it at all. It is indeed a strange problem and OS. 8.6 isn't exactly in the experimental stages. As far as someone deliberately doing something like this is hard to say, unless they devised a new type of virus and was trying it out. Good luck -- Tony LaFemina Major in Spreadsheet Layout & Design Techniques Minor in Software Fundamentals http://hometown.aol.com/visitmacland/index.html mailto:remacs at optonline.net The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be September 24 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
