OSX loosing his users, help wanted

[macv]

Is there a unix guru here that can tell me whats happening and what I should look for to stop my system loosing his users?



This is my setup:

G5 1,6 OSX 10.2.8
first harddisk has the OSX system on the first partition, the second partition is a scratchdisk
second and third harddisk are mirrorred and contain the users desktops (yes, the users desktops are not on the startup disk anymore). I used the technique described here www.osxfaq.com/tutorials/quotas/index.ws to move the userdesktops from the startupdisk to the usersdisk.

forth disk is a bootable system backup

The reason: I want to keep the system disk clean and I want a bootable backup (with carbon copy cloner)
I want also to do incremental bakups of the userdisk (with retrospect).




The system ran well for a week(start and stop every day), but then lost the users desktops.
I could reboot from the backup, everything ok, all users desktops back. I could restore the main system, everything ok as before. But some days later it lost the users again. This happend three times now.

When it loses the desktops, it creates new blank desktops. In "netinfo" all information of the users is still there as supposed to be.

Directory of the startup disk, before the problemtaken with "Xupport"

startupdisk/volumes/users/usernames
/scratch
/system backup


Directory of the startup disk, after the problem:

startupdisk/volumes/users is grayed, looks like a folder, is locked
/users 1/usernames
/scratch
/system backup



It looks as if the /volume/users gets locked and is not available at startup. So OSX creates a dummy "users 1"


After the problem Netinfo still shows wat it is supposed to show: if I select a user it still shows /volumes/users/username for home




All suggestions welcome, but keep it simple, as I am not a unix expert as you are.

marc

 

[macv]

It is almost certain now that the softRAID disk sometimes mounts to late. How can I tell OSX to wait for the usersdisk to mount, before assigning the users homes? Or should I stop using softRAID??

 

[Arden]

Don't turn it on until you want it accessed, perhaps? This won't work if the drives are internal...

 

[macv]

It is almost certain now that the softRAID disk sometimes mounts to late. How can I tell OSX to wait for the usersdisk to mount, before assigning the users homes? Or should I stop using softRAID??

After to many restores I moved the users, disabled the softraid mirrored drives, and moved the users back to the drives. Works fine until now. No more softraid for this.