Panther puts an alias to HD in /Volumes, why?

TheCrunge11 · #1 November 5th, 2003, 06:41 PM

Does anyone have any idea why Panther is putting an alias to the hard drive in /Volumes? Here's the thing, in Jaguar, the /Volumes folder only contained volumes other than the boot drive. Now, Panther tosses an alias for the boot drive in there.

If I drag the hard drive onto a terminal window, it shows /
If I drag the alias from /Volumes to the terminal, it shows /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD.

So, for some reason, the ALIAS to the root of the boot drive shows up as an additional volume, instead of just /

Without getting too deep into why this is a problem for me, I need that alias to not be there because it's name is the same name as other drives that I must connect periodically. This makes the other drives show up as "Macintosh HD 1", thus rendering some of my scripts that I need useless
(and before anyone says "just change the name of the drive", I can't, they all need to be the same name for setting up loaner computers for people, I have scripts that move their home folder from one machine to another and all the machines are cloned to be exactly alike, so changing the name is out of the question).

In Jaguar, this wasn't a problem as the system didn't put the alias in the /Volumes folder.

If I delete the alias, all is fine, until a restart. Something during the boot process (not the login process) is putting that damn alias in there (and If I open /Volumes then change the name of the boot drive on the desktop, it changes the name of the alias).

So, my question is, does anybody know how to kill whatever is making that alias?

Is this clear?

Thanks for any help.

Arden · #2 November 5th, 2003, 07:23 PM

Are you proficient with Applescript? If so, write one that deletes that alias and put the script in your login items. If you aren't proficient with it, I'm sure someone would be happy to write the script for you (hell, I'll do it).

TheCrunge11 · #3 November 5th, 2003, 07:32 PM

The thing is with a login script is that the alias to the drive is created before login, so any subsequent firewire drive would still have the "1" after it (assuming its connected during the boot process).

Arden · #4 November 5th, 2003, 08:04 PM

Well, why not make the script rename the drive then?

TheCrunge11 · #5 November 5th, 2003, 08:17 PM

I hear the logic there, but the thing is, even if I rename the drive, the other firewire drive will be mounted before the rename, thus it will have the "1" tagged after it. Besides, I can't rename the drive because that negates alot of management tasks that I currently have in place. You would really have to see it in action, but all the computers' hard drives need to have the same name because they are all imaged from a master, and from one day to another, any computer could be a loaner or an assigned unit. I am juggling home folders around (and no, I can't have a network home folder for the user because I'm dealing with laptops).
This has been working fine for months, until now this pesky alias.

The ideal situation would be to have my scripts get the drive name, no matter what it is. So my script to copy home folders wouldnt have to be absolute, it could be told to copy from the first non-boot disk, no matter what the name is. Unfortunately, I am a novice in scripting, and I'm not sure I'm comfortable making the script.

So if anyone can point me how to tell a shell script to do this:

ditto -rsrc /Volumes/firstnonbootdrive/Users/homefolder /Macintosh\ HD /Users/homefolder

where "firstnonbootdrive" can be named anything and the script will know...

Sigh

Thanks for help!