Changing the mount point of a volume

E

ericmurphy

Registered
Normally, volumes mount under /Volumes in OS X. Is there a way to change where a volume is mounted? I've got an external firewire drive, and I would dearly love to have it mount under my home directory. There's gotta be a way...
 
Open a new terminal window and create a symbolic link to the Firewire drive in your home directory. This should work just as well for most things you might want to do. Use the following command to do so...

ln -s /Volumes/FWHDName/ ~/FWHDName
 
I tried that, but as far as the Finder's concerned, it's just an alias. An alias would work fine, except that it doesn't work over an Appletalk connection (the remote system says the original item cannot be found), and it doesn't work via ftp. Maybe I need to create a hard link? Except, I guess you can't hard link to a directory...hmm...
 
There is a difference between the alias that the Finder makes and the symbolic link that can be made from the Terminal. To the Finder though, an alias and a symbolic link are represented visually the same way and do the same thing when selected. In the terminal though, they are definitely different. You can follow symbolic links in the terminal, but not an alias created by the Finder. The same is true for FTP sessions, you can follow symbolic links, but not an alias created by the Finder. I'm not sure about an Appletalk connection, but I would think it should be the same for an FTP connection, but I don't know for sure. If you are an Admin on your machine, you should be able to go up to the root anyway and find your FireWire HD in the Volumes directory at the root. I often do this over an FTP session myself.
 
This seems like a better solution. But what happens if I dismount the drive? Which, presumably, can happen, since it's a firewire drive? Or if I turn the drive off?

Maybe I should only do this with a non-removable drive, like an ATA or SCSI drive?
 
Can you mount a partion(or a drive) to a mount point like /Applications or /Users?

I'm asking this for two reasons. One, I have installed other *nix OSs before and at install times you can have partions mounted at points like home.
Second, Because I am on an iMac rev D. and I cant install the any OS on a partion after the first 8GB( and MacOSX will not install on a partion that grows out of that first 8GB.) So I have all these Partions that I have to worry about. I would rather not.

Looks like the solution above would only work if the mount point is not already taken by other stuff. Like /Applications...

Could I move or re-name /Applications to something like /Applicationstemp set up the mount then copy /Applicationstemp back to /Applecations? in that way having /Applications on a differnent partion with out using any kind of links(and having the links deleted when ever I install a apple app.)

Thx!
 
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