It's done. The rescue was carried out successfully and now I'm a happy Mac user again. Here's how I solved the problem. Many thanks to Carl Jerris on Apple Discussions forum for giving me some directions.
Because I didn't have any backups of my files at all so after the ambush I hurried to get a 160G external hard disk and an enclosure with both FireWire and USB 2 connecting capabality, hoping that it was still not too late to salvage what was left. I bought the one with FireWire because you can use it to boot the computer while you can't do it with USB in Mac. I was trying to turn off the FileVault on OZ (hard disk) for the backup procedure because with it on all my files are encrypted and there was no way to access them, but after like an hour of waiting it informed me that I did not have enough space to do that.
So I decided to take another approach. After I assambled the whole external HD thing, which took me quite a while because 2 of the screws almost failed and I was at the point of throwing that shit out of the window, but I held the temper back and after I don't know how long of sitting there staring into nothing and cursing I started slowly again, I partitioned the external into 3 partitions: Bootable Backup Disk (37.14G), Althea (37.14G) and Rebecca (74.4G). Then I installed a new copy of the OS into the Bootable, boot the machine with it. When logged into the system with no problem, I cloned the entire encrypyed OZ to Rebecca and disabled FileVault from there. The moment the hour-long operation was done, everything went back to normal, white bar, desktop and Finders just popped back into life and none of my files were hurt. It was FileVault that somehow stopped the OS from reaching the files.
So I erased the whole internal hard drive and cloned again, only in a reverse direction this time. Now the internal's called Siberia. The moral of this post is simple: do backups religiously and keep the FileVault off. Finally I can sleep, and I mean it literally.
Because I didn't have any backups of my files at all so after the ambush I hurried to get a 160G external hard disk and an enclosure with both FireWire and USB 2 connecting capabality, hoping that it was still not too late to salvage what was left. I bought the one with FireWire because you can use it to boot the computer while you can't do it with USB in Mac. I was trying to turn off the FileVault on OZ (hard disk) for the backup procedure because with it on all my files are encrypted and there was no way to access them, but after like an hour of waiting it informed me that I did not have enough space to do that.
So I decided to take another approach. After I assambled the whole external HD thing, which took me quite a while because 2 of the screws almost failed and I was at the point of throwing that shit out of the window, but I held the temper back and after I don't know how long of sitting there staring into nothing and cursing I started slowly again, I partitioned the external into 3 partitions: Bootable Backup Disk (37.14G), Althea (37.14G) and Rebecca (74.4G). Then I installed a new copy of the OS into the Bootable, boot the machine with it. When logged into the system with no problem, I cloned the entire encrypyed OZ to Rebecca and disabled FileVault from there. The moment the hour-long operation was done, everything went back to normal, white bar, desktop and Finders just popped back into life and none of my files were hurt. It was FileVault that somehow stopped the OS from reaching the files.
So I erased the whole internal hard drive and cloned again, only in a reverse direction this time. Now the internal's called Siberia. The moral of this post is simple: do backups religiously and keep the FileVault off. Finally I can sleep, and I mean it literally.
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