migrating user accounts from one disk to another?

B

barumba

Registered
Hi,

OS X was damaged on the startup disk so I installed it on another disk and created a new directory on the new startup disk. I can still see all the old files on the corrupted disk. Is there a way to import all the user home folders (including permissions) from the old startup disk to the new one?

any information would be much appreciated!

thanks!
 
Is this on the Mac OS X Server?
Page 12 on the migration manual shows the steps for bringing that data over on the new system/hard drive.
 
yes it's on a OS X Server 10.4.10. and i'm not upgrading to leopard. i installed OS X server to another startup disk and want to be able to export the old directory with user home folders and permissions to the new disk. as of now, the new OS X server is up and running but user accounts haven't been imported yet. the problem is i can only access the old HD if i boot through the new startup disk. the old startup disk won't boot at all.

thanks!
 
are these network home accounts... meaning they are the home folder a network users logs into... or are they local accounts?
 
yes these are network accounts, some of them mobile, and home folders located on that startup disk.

i read somewhere that it's easy to do this if you've actually exported it from the previous system and then import it in the new one but i really didn't have the opportunity to do this. right now, i can't access the OS on the disk, i just have access to the files if I start up from another disk.

thanks!
 
Ouch. If you don't have a backup and you can't access the original records, you're probably going to have to rebuild from scratch, then apply the new user information to the data. Remember, user1 != user1 if the UIDs are different. You could also look to see the id of each user home and see if you can get the UID out of that.

Was this an Open Directory? If so, you really should have a Replica. If not a replica, at least do a daily/weekly backup of the OD DB with the nifty GUI button in Server Admin. It'll save you a ton of time in case of drive failure or the like! :)

Michael
 
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