Max Miles said:
One problem, this isn't working:
mv /Users /Users.old
do I have to rename these folders?
m
This move would need to be done as the super user.
However, you should not use
cp to copy the Users directory to the new partition since
cp will not copy over the Apple specific attributes or resources.
The safe way to do this (assuming you have already deleted the copy of Users that you made on your user partition using "cp") is:
Code:
sudo mkdir /Volumes/<userpart>/Users
sudo chown root:admin /Volumes/<userpart>/Users
sudo chmod o+t /Volumes/<userpart>/Users
cd /Users
where
<userpart> is the name of the partition you want to move your user folder to.
The commands above set up your new (and empty)
Users folder. Now you need to copy the home directories for each of your users across:
Code:
sudo ditto -rsrc /Users/<username> /Volumes/<userpart>/Users/<username>
Repeat the ditto command for each of your users substituting the actual user folder names for
<username>. You may also want to copy across the
/Users/Shared folder.
At this stage you should have two identical copies of your Users folder, the original one at
/Users and the new one at
/Volumes/<userpart>/Users. Browse around a bit to check that the permissions all look the same (using
ls -lag).
When you are happy that the new Users folder is correctly copied you need to move the old users folder to a new name and create a symbolic link since OS X expects to find the users folder at
/Users. The commands to do these two steps are:
Code:
sudo mv /Users /Users.old
sudo ln -s /Volumes/<userpart>/Users /Users
Now logout and log back in (do not reboot yet). Open a terminal and run the command
pwd this should print out
/Volumes/<userpart>/Users/<username> if everything has worked. If it prints out
/Users/<username> then you have not set up the link correctly.
You can now open NetInfo, navigate to the users listing and edit each of the users you have created so that their home directory is listed as
/Volumes/<userpart>/Users/<username> instead of
/Users/<username>. By changing the NetInfo entry you eliminate the extra lookup needed when a program accesses
/Users and then needs to lookup
/Volumes/<userpart>/Users to access the files.
Now, reboot your computer and work with it for a week or so. If you don't encounter any problems you can delete the backup
/Users.old folder since you no longer need it.
Edit: corrected errors in ditto and ln commands.
