DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!!!!!

T

thedbp

Frantic Messenger of Hope
OK ... I can't believe I did this ... but I thought it might be somewhat amusing for you all.

I set up all my little prefs and eccentricities in my user account. no problem. I didn't want to have to do all that for the account I set up for my roomates, so I figured that I'd just copy over the "Library" folder from my User folder to the User folder for my roomies.

I boldly log in as root and perform this wildly stupid feat.

Ooops. I forgot to hold down option. Maybe I should stop taking bing hots while I do this. Now I don't have a Library folder in my User folder. Great. I'll just copy it from where I moved it too. Its all the same files, in the same place, it should work, right?

Wrong.

So I logout and log back in as me. Uh-oh. My desktop prefs are gone. My dock only contains the Trash and the Desktop icon. The files that were on my Desktop are there, but when I try to trash them it says that it is "unable."

Hehehehehehehehe. I just reinstalled it. Didn't even want to bother with the whys and wherefores, but if anybody who knows more than me about unix or the OS X filesystem (basically anyone) can shed some light on why this happend, i'd be interested.

Thanks!

thedbp
 
bp,

ouch, that sucks. that sounds like something you should report to apple -- my only guess is that a bunch of soft links got hosed? But I can't find any in my library folder right now.

does anyone know if there are any such beasts in the ~/Library folders?

zach
 
Soft links point to path/file location. If you move another file into the same place the soft link works on the new file. Aliases, on the other hand, follow the original. I wouldn't be surprised if you had aliases pointing across user boundaries.

Just a thought.
 
bp, the reson this happend to you is that when you copy files and/or folders, the permissions of the copied files and folders are set to the user you copied them with!
Now, when you put your 'library' folder into your roomates account folder, then copied them back to your folder, you not only made it so only 'root' can make changes to the contents of your 'library' folder (your prefs, etc), but you also made it so only your account can make changes to your roomates 'library' stuff! For some reson, OS X does not use prefrances that it cannot make changes to, and that is why only the finder and trash icons showed up!
If you want to copy prefrences to another user, logon to the other user, then copy the prefrences folder (not the library folder, unless there are other things you need from there) from the first account into the other account. The alternative is to put your prefrences into the global prefrences found in /library, though i am not sure if this method works.
 
That makes sense - perhaps you'll be able to help me with another little anomoly I've encountered:

After running Norton DD 4.0 on my Mac OS X hd (a mistaken mouse click, actually, not intentional) and 8.6 hd, I started seeing a disk on my OS X desktop called "MOSX_BOOTER." a readme file on the disk says that the disk SHOULD be invisible, but if it isn't, to just ignore it.

After the aforementioned debacle with the Library folders, I reinitialized and reinstalled X, happily thinking that it would solve the 'mystery disk' problem - but it didn't. Which leads me ot believe that the disk image is actually located on my 8.6 hd, but even searching for invisible files with that name on all hd's didn't turn anything up.

Its not in the way and it doesn't inhibit anything. Its just annoying and I'd like it to go away. Staring evilly at it, my last resort, failed to work as well.

Thanks for your help!

thedbp
 
See if it's actually another partition that you can see in Drive Setup. Also, searching for .img files with the same name won't work - usaully they rename the file aka if u make a disk image called Bob, the actual .img file could be called hello.img. So, u really should be searching by kind...

HTH,
F-bacher
 
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