Repairing symbolic link with 2 HD set up after HD swap

robcommon said:

Hi,
I have a MBP with two hard drives in it. I took out the optical drive, put my hard disk drive in there, and put a SSD in my main HD bay. I then installed my OS on my SSD and assigned symbolic links to my HDD for folders like Music and Movies and such. Well I ran out of room on my HDD and upgraded to a larger drive but now I can't go into my users folder and click on my Movies and Music folders like I used to and get directed easily. I tried using some of the same code I used to use to do that. I think it was,

cp -R ~/Music/ /Volumes/Data/Music/
sudo rm -rf ~/Music/
ln -s /Volumes/Data/Music ~/Music

Anyways some help in repairing a symbolic link would be awesome.

TYTYTYTY for any help.

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Your rm command did not remove the ~/Music folder so trying to link to a folder that already exists in that location is not going to work. Since it looks like you want to have your user files stored on the non-ssd drive you would probably be better off just moving your user folder to that drive. You could do this two ways copy either the user folder to the new location or the Users folder. Once done that go into System Preferences and then the Users & Groups click on your account Advanced in there you have the option to set your home folder location choose the new one save and reboot to have it take effect. When booted back into the system confirm everything works then delete the old folder or it will continue to see and use it or at least it did when I last tried this on 10.6.

robcommon said:

Thank you for the input.

The commands that I listed worked before. I really liked the way I had it because I still had the folders where I wanted them, and it just appeared like i had them on my main SSD.... Will doing it the way you said change that?

I don't think I want all my files on the HDD, especially not applications as I run parallels and the SSD really helps with that. Is there another way of fixing this that sets it up the same way I had it before?

BTW I'm freaked out by using the sudo command so I have not tried to use that line yet. Should I? Will it be safe? I used the "rm music" command when I was in the directory and it made that file disappear. I don't want to screw more up so I'm basically waiting for someone to point me in the right direction now and save my ass.

TYTYTYT for all support

Click to expand...

All your files will not be on the hdd only the ones in your home directory. Unless you install all your applications into your ~/Applications directory and not the /Applications directory the one most people and OSX use by default when you are dragging the apps to it. Doing it the way I suggest moves the home directory off your SSD onto the HDD so it changes that location from the SSD to another drive. The folders like Music, Movies, Documents are all moved to the new drive as they are contained in the home directory and anything saved to them will go onto the HDD drive. The sudo command would be safe as long as you have made sure that everything was copied to the new location before removing. When I do something like that I use either a Getinfo on the two locations to make sure the files and size match or a du -h /path/to/the/directories on the command line to get similar output for comparison.