Moved home folder - Stuck on blue screen.

[electronique]

HI.

Ive installed a 2nd HDD to my MBP.. To prepare for migrating docs, I moved my home folder to the 2nd HDD using this guide -
http://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-move-the-home-folder-in-os-x-and-why/

Change home folder - Restarted - Now im stuck on the Blue screen before login.

Some replies to that guide state something about user permissions, path of the 2nd HDD etc etc.

Im confused. Some are even stating its not possible anymore?

How can I move my documents, music, movies and pictures folders to the 2nd HDD safely?

 

[r0k]

HI.

Ive installed a 2nd HDD to my MBP.. To prepare for migrating docs, I moved my home folder to the 2nd HDD using this guide -
http://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-move-the-home-folder-in-os-x-and-why/

Change home folder - Restarted - Now im stuck on the Blue screen before login.

Some replies to that guide state something about user permissions, path of the 2nd HDD etc etc.

Im confused. Some are even stating its not possible anymore?

How can I move my documents, music, movies and pictures folders to the 2nd HDD safely?

First of all, you need to create a home folder so you can at least boot. It is always better to copy than to move stuff. If you had copied the stuff, you could then remove things one at a time until you ran into problems and you'd understand what broke.

Now you can't even boot. I would imagine you have your Mac set up with only one user account. This is a mistake. You should always have a second account so you can log in to that account for recovery purposes in a situation like the one you are in right now.

As for being impossible to move home account. I think not. Here is something you can try:

Where is the other disk mounted? Is it in /volumes/otherdisk ?

do the following. In a shell, which you can get to without fully booting, try the following:

cd /users
ln -s /volumes/otherdisk/{myhome} {myhome}

Replace {myhome} with the name of your home folder.

Your Mac now thinks your home folder is right where it should be and you should be able to boot. Hopefully sudo isn't required because your Mac will not be able to find your password file and thus grant you sudo priveleges if it can't even find your home folder.

 

[electronique]

cd /users
ln -s /volumes/otherdisk/{myhome} {myhome}

Gives me an error (?)
'Read-only file system'

 

[r0k]

Gives me an error (?)
'Read-only file system'

Ouch.

Are you booted up in single user mode? If you are in single user mode, you should be able to get around this. Then when you reboot in normal mode, OS X thinks everything is where it belongs.

Once you get up and running again, remember to create a spare account you can log in and get the full gui to fix things when they break this badly.

If you like having your account as an admin (not managed) account, when you create a backup account make sure it is an admin account so you can do real work to repair things when they break. If your account is too badly broken to use, having a spare account that is managed means the OS has to go look in your (now missing) folder to check your password and your hands are still tied.

 

[electronique]

Ouch.

Are you booted up in single user mode? If you are in single user mode, you should be able to get around this.

Yeah. I booted with command+s
Entered the code above and got that error.

I give up. Going to install OSX again, and try and do things right.