If a Mac OS X system's settings have been reset to the defaults and its documents have been moved after the computer has been turned on or woken up from sleep, it can indicate that the account's home folder has been renamed, that there may be a permissions issue, or an issue with FileVault if it has been enabled for that account.
Depending on the situation, this issue can be fixed by methods including:- Opening the Users folder on the hard disk and renaming folders so that the folder containing the account's data has the former name of the folder with the house icon. After this has been done, a tool such as ChangeShortName can be used to properly change this account's name.
- If FileVault is enabled, using the Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder to repair the image containing it.
- If the home folder is on a secondary partition or external drive, connecting that drive to the computer or mounting the partition, and then logging out and back in.
- Open the NetInfo Manager in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder, changing the home property of the user account in question to point to the desired location and only that property, followed by logging out and back in.
- For a situtation in which the computer produces permission denied messages, open the Terminal application in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder and running:
sudo chown -R $UID ~/
followed by a space. This command will prompt for a password, which will not produce anything in the Terminal window while it is being typed. If the folder still can't be accessed, run 'chmod -R u+rwX ~/ in the Terminal, log out, and log back in.
