OSX/users on separate drives -ownership issues

[macstatic]

I have a Mac Pro with multiple internal drives where OSX, my apps and the admin user is on an SSD while my regular users are on a separate drive. Mac Performance guide's "relocate the Home directory off the boot drive" explains how and has been working fine for a long time.

But recently I've been having various problems and made it worse by messing around with changing permissions/ownerships, so I've decided to backup and reinstall everything. So far the SSD is done, so next is the data drive.
But after creating the additional (normal) users I tried to copy these over to the data drive (logged in as administrator) and got some error messages about permissions and/or ownerships, so now that I've backed up the whole drive my plan is to reformat the data drive, copy the user folders over to that drive, relocate the users ("Users & Groups" advanced settings in system preferences as described in the above Mac Performance guide), then copy over my files/folders one by one.

My questions is: when formatting ("erasing" in Disk Utility) the data drive prior to copying the newly created user folders (from the SSD), should I be logged in as admin or as the main regular user or doesn't it matter? Obviously I need to be logged in as admin to copy over the other users and relocate them, but I want to ensure that the permissions will be correct when I erase the data drive to begin with.

 

[Weaselboy]

My questions is: when formatting ("erasing" in Disk Utility) the data drive prior to copying the newly created user folders (from the SSD), should I be logged in as admin or as the main regular user or doesn't it matter

It makes no difference. A formatted drive is a formatted drive no matter what account you did it from.

 

[macstatic]

Thanks for clearing that up, and of course it makes perfect sense as the permissions/ownerships belong to the files and folders, not the drive itself.

The problems I had were easily solved by logging out of the admin account, then into the account I wanted to move the home folder (i.e. "Testuser").
Once I logged into the same user as the folder belonged to I was allowed to copy it (i.e. the "Testuser" folder) from the SSD over to the data drive. Following that I rebooted the Mac, logged in as admin, entered the "Users & groups" system preference where I right-clicked on the "Testuser" account (to access "Advanced options...") where I changed the path to its home folder by selecting the (newly copied) "Testuser" folder on the data drive instead. Once that was done I deleted (I could probably rename it first just to be on the safe side) original "Testuser" folder on the SSD and repeated the whole procedure for the next user.