My teen house guest uses my computer after I go to sleep at night. For months there has been no problem, till last night.

She "says" she did a reboot and then pushed the wrong key as the system was coming back on. Every icon on my desktop, except my HD, was removed.

I searched in vain for the missing icons. I reinstalled yahoo mail, Gmail, Yahoo Messenger, Google and the Eunuch Archive.

Any ideas on how to retrieve my other missing icons or where they might gone?

MacTheWolf (imported) wrote: Mon Jun 07, 2010 12:11 pm My teen house guest uses my computer after I go to sleep at night. For months there has been no problem, till last night.

She "says" she did a reboot and then pushed the wrong key as the system was coming back on. Every icon on my desktop, except my HD, was removed.

I searched in vain for the missing icons. I reinstalled yahoo mail, Gmail, Yahoo Messenger, Google and the Eunuch Archive.

Any ideas on how to retrieve my other missing icons or where they might gone?

If you can open Windows you should be able to do a "RESTORE".

This will allow you to restore your computer configuration to an earlier time. If you have not done a recent backup you will lose everything that was done between the date of your most recent backup and the present date.

Most systems do automatic backups every week or so.

Find somebody who knows what they are doing to do this. What version of Windows are you running?

Firstly, you should not need to actually re-install the programs. The icons on the desktop are usually just shortcuts. If you go to the Start Menu | Programs menu you should see the programs are all still there. (If not then your visitor did something pretty drastic to the computer.) Normally restoring your desktop should just require you to copy some shortcuts back.

But if you're like most people you probably also had other files on the desktop that you might not want to lose, so it is worth trying to restore the desktop. You probably already tried these but if not:

1) Check your recycle bin (trash can) to see if they were deleted. If they are there you should be able to right-click and restore them.

2) Often people just drag things into another folder. I think a file search of the whole drive (probably your C-drive but might have to look at all of them) should find them, assuming you know the name of some of them in order to perform the search.

3) As mentioned by A-1, you may have a restore point. However, it really depends on your settings, how long since your last restore, and what was done since your last restore. I personally have not had a lot of luck with restores. Also, I don't know if the restore points affect your data files -- I think they mostly affect installed programs. So I'm not sure it will restore your desktop icons.

4) Some computers have a presentation mode which hides things on the desktop. It is a view setting (right click on desktop). I use that sort of things in business meetings when I don't want to show customers everything on my desktop, but just want to open on presentation made for them. Check out this help forum that describes a problem similar to yours: http://forums.cnet.com/5208-12546_102-0 ... dID=309531

That's pretty much all that I can think of ... hope you didn't lose too much valuable. It always takes such a loss to re-learn the importance of backing up data.

Windows is out of the question since I use an iMac.

Is there a restore on iMac's?

MacTheWolf (imported) wrote: Mon Jun 07, 2010 12:11 pm My teen house guest uses my computer after I go to sleep at night. For months there has been no problem, till last night.

She "says" she did a reboot and then pushed the wrong key as the system was coming back on. Every icon on my desktop, except my HD, was removed.

I searched in vain for the missing icons. I reinstalled yahoo mail, Gmail, Yahoo Messenger, Google and the Eunuch Archive.

Any ideas on how to retrieve my other missing icons or where they might gone?

Keep the little shit off your box - password it.

Amen! NEVER let someone else jack with your computer.

If the boys want to use mine, they log on as "Boys" and can't do crap with the restrictions in place.

Mac, there is a reason they call it a PC, Personal Computer.

But then again you use a mac so all bets are off.

River

Ken_SD suggested I do a reboot holding down the Apple and Alt keys. I'll try it.

markle, an iMac whiz kid, and I talked for about 30 minutes on the phone today. After much searching, he's convinced my desktop files fell into the abyss and are gone forever. Oh well, we tried

I thank everyone here who offered advice.

Ken_SD delivers my new iMac on Friday. It is already password encoded.

I don't know how MAC's work as far as disk naming, etc., but on a PC, the operating system is usually stored on the C: or main hard drive. I NEVER keep anything of value on the C: drive. I learned a long time ago that another internal hard drive, or an external USB one, were the safest places to keep things. If the new one only has one hard drive, I'd suggest you store the goodies not on the Desktop, but in a folder somewhere else on the hard drive like "Downloads". When an OS goes, Desktop is usually the first thing to go with it and not come back on a reinstall.