Som VERY bizarre things going on happening to my Mac Pro...

[Drummy]

Okay, first a bit of back story. I have 4 drives in my MP. 3 for storage, and 1 SSD for the OS. I recently swapped out one of these HDDs, the one with the HOME directory on it, for a larger drive. To do this I CCCed the entire contents over and then swapped out the HDDs. After I rebooted everything was fine. It all ran exactly as I'd have expected.

That is until today. I think I may have made an error somewhere along the way, but basically I was first having trouble logging in, then I was having trouble loading up after login, then noticed my Mac Pro had been renamed to "Daniel Drumm's Mac Pro (3)", and then I noticed that in the "shared" area in finder there was ANOTHER Mac Pro named "Daniel Drumm's Mac Pro (2)". Now after having re-told the Mac where the HOME directory is, the login issues, loading issues etc. have solved the selves, and it's running like my superfast Mac Pro again. The only difference I've noticed so far is that the Apps I usually have in my dock are gone, and a lot of preferences I had are also not as they were. I'm guessing my OS and the HOME folder were having communication issues...any thing else I should look out for? Is this serious?

 

[derbothaus]

Probably a user ID or hostname problem. After moving home are you still UID 501? or did it change?

 

[Drummy]

Probably a user ID or hostname problem. After moving home are you still UID 501? or did it change?

I'm not sure. Unfortunately I'm away now and can't check the status of my MacPro until I get back. I've just been on the phone with my brother as I had forgotten to check things were working properly before I left (I left fairly abruptly) and rudimentary things like iTunes are having trouble playing, finding files, which is a good indication that my Mac is very confused.

I think I'm looking at an OS reinstall to be honest...I'll have to reinstall some of my apps but given that ALL of my media/document/samples/etc. files are on other drives it wouldn't actually be as big a headache as it might otherwise be.

Do you think that's a wise move or are there easier/quicker ways of solving the problem just as cleanly?

Would the OS have trouble communicating if I did a reinstall of OSXSnow Leopard, and then reassigned the HOME folder to where it should be on the separate drive again? The folder naming conventions and hierarchy would all be the way iTunes does them for instance (it was iTunes that did them in the first place) so would it JUST work.

Thanks

 

[derbothaus]

It should be straight forward. Make sure you name the account created at boot to the exact same shortname and account name as your Home folder currently. Go into System Prefs and re-link home folder and reboot. You are relinking "Home" in the advanced section of Accounts pref pane are you not?

 

[Drummy]

Okay, I'm back now and can confirm that my UID is still 501, and that I have re-linked my Home folder using the advance options. It doesn't seem to have worked. I'm still getting issues with basic programmes locking up. Notably with iTunes, it has problems playing things without stopping and freezing and just showed the message "The iTunes library file could not be save, disk could not be read from or written to" Help...

 

[jenzjen]

Had same issue when I used to move my entire home folder. After 3 days of t shooting with no resolution, I did a clean install and vowed never to move the home folder again. Now, I leave it on the SSD just redirect my apps like iTunes etc to store its library on the storage drive.

 

[Drummy]

Solved!

I took advantage of my AppleCare, and called apple tech support. They guided me though it. I had to repair the permissions for the OS drive, and repair disk on both the HOME and OS drives. It has solved the issues; that is they haven't presented themselves thus far but I'll bump if they resurface. Thanks for everyones advice