Re: my home folders have become empty

Felix A Sun, 10 Oct 2004 19:40:45 -0700

Peter, you are a freaking genius. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm replying to you on the list so if someone searches through the archives on this topic, it might be of some benefit. I goofed up the first time and applied the mv command to the files with the 1 on them. DUH!! Those were the "real ones" I even booted into the real boot up volume and it booted up fine with the blank home folders again. I went back to the cloned drive and saw that a new volume had been created named "OtherPartition". The others were back to "Big Drive" and "Big Drive 1", etc. I applied to mv command to the right ones and now I'm back on my startup disk and everything is "hunky dory" to use your technical term. You are a unix master indeed. Thank you. Now my output reads:

[oldbeige:/Volumes/OS X Drive/Volumes] felix% ls "/Volumes/OS X Drive/Volumes" Big Drive Jaguar OS X Drive bogus swap Bogus Drive MP3s OtherPartition swap [oldbeige:/Volumes/OS X Drive/Volumes] felix%

And I will just go ahead and remove the bogus ones and the "OtherPartition". Many thanks again. I understand that it's your theory that this would not have happened if I kept my main user account in the startup volume? I will work on that. Maybe I'll be getting another drive and I'll get to re-plan the whole breakdown too. If I had not had the cloned drive, I supposed I could have done this in single user mode?

-Felix


On Oct 10, 2004, at 4:33 PM, Peter da Silva wrote:

Peter, thank you very much.  Yes, I do see the "Big
Drive 1".  I am trying to understand your fix and also
your recommendation.  You seem to be saying that it's
not a good idea to put your main account on a separate
partition.  Do you mean by main account the owner of
the computer, as opposed to the one I will use
regularly?

Da.

The one I use regularly will have a lot of
data in it which fills up my startup volume, so that's
why it's on a separate partition, but I did create an
admin acct that resides in the expected place in the
startup volume.  Would that have been of any help?


All I know is that if the home for the main admin account doesn't exist
it will get created, empty. I don't know if other admin accounts will
do that, but they won't stop this from happening.

What I do is to leave my account on the system disk, but symlink Documents and Music over to folders on my big partition.

Ok, for the fix, you say, log in the old system disk,
meaning "OS X" is my startup volume.  The name of the
volume that I can boot into that works right now is
"swap" because I had been using it as the swap space
for OS X 10.3.5 in Volume "OS X".  "Big Drive" is the
volume they both share for users.  So, again, you say
go boot the computer with startup disk "OS X" (the one
that's giving me empty home folders"), and go to
finder and rename "Big Drive" where my main accounts
reside in to "Bogus Drive".


I don't think so.

You want to boot into whichever drive it is that *isn't* giving you empty home folders. Then you want to go into the *other* drive and find the folder "Volumes/Big Drive" with the empty home directory in it. Rename that to "Volumes/Bogus Drive".

Then when you boot back to the original drive, "Big Drive" will mount as "Volumes/Big Drive" and everything will be hunky dory.

I see you also have a "swap 1", so you'll probably find a directory called swap with the same issues. You'll want to rename that as well.

Best to do it under the shell.

What I'm wondering is, how
does Panther then use the home folders that are there
if the name of the volume has changed?


The name of the volume hasn't been changed. The name of the directory
it's been mounted on has changed, which is why UNIX and Cocoa apps
end up looking in the wrong place.

By asking
this, I realize I might sound as if I haven't learned
anything from all you've told me.  Are you saying that
if I rename "Big Drive" something else, the real "Big
Drive" will then be mounted?


If you rename tha *directory* 'Big Drive' in right place.

[oldbeige:~] felix% mount
/dev/disk0s7 on / (local)
devfs on /dev (local)
fdesc on /dev (union)
<volfs> on /.vol
/dev/disk0s6 on /Volumes/Jaguar (local)
/dev/disk0s8 on /Volumes/MP3s (local)
automount -nsl [299] on /Network (automounted)
automount -fstab [345] on /automount/Servers
(automounted)
automount -static [345] on /automount/static
(automounted)
/dev/disk1s10 on /Volumes/Big Drive (local, nodev,
nosuid)
/dev/disk1s9 on /Volumes/OS X Drive (local, nodev,
nosuid, journaled)

OK, this is what you should see. Now, when you're booted like this, have a look at the output of:

        ls "/Volumes/OS X Drive/Volumes"

        (don't forget the quotes)

You'll see the bogus "swap" and "Big Drive" directories. Rename
*those* to "Bogus Drive" and "Bogus Swap". Try these commands:

        cd "/Volumes/OS X Drive/Volumes"
        ls -lai

This "ls" should show 'Big Drive' and 'swap' but no 'Jaguar' or 'MP3s'. It may show a dummy 'OS X Drive' that's a symlink. Once you have verified that it looks right (if it doesn't, send me the output), do this:

        mv "Big Drive" "Bogus Drive"
        mv "swap" "Bogus Swap"

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Re: my home folders have become empty

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