Re: Issue with drive contents
- From: dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (David Empson)
- Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:19:07 +1300
<JimS0882@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have situation that I don't know how to fix. It probably is simple
but I'm evidently not terribly bright about this. :-(
Some time ago I dragged and dropped digital image folders/files from
my main Mac HD to a second internal drive named Media. No other
applications or other files were copied. At some point later I saw
that my entire Mac HD contents were also on Media ( but the digital
image folders and files that I moved are not on Mac HD). If I drag a
folder from either drive to the trash the same folder on the other
drive also goes so I can't rid Media of the content that I don't want
on it. I don't know what I did to cause this to happen. I have
started getting ready to install Leopard so I have an external drive
with Mac HD Backup and Media Backup partitions. I used SuperDuper to
backup Mac HD. When I open that from the external drive and try to
delete a folder, the same folder is deleted from both internal drives
as well.
How do I undo these linkages and make each drive independent again?
What you are describing is very strange, and I've never heard of it
before, so don't feel too bad about your puzzlement.
There is no mechanism I'm aware of in the file system which would allow
this sort of behaviour. The closest I can think of would be if your
supposed hard drive icons were actually aliases to the same single
volume, but that wouldn't explain selected files being visible only on
one volume.
This suggests that what you are seeing might be a Finder bug, corrupted
Finder preferences or similar.
What Mac model do you have, and which OS version are you running at
present? "Second internal drive" implies a PowerMac G4, PowerMac G5 or
Mac Pro.
Do you have access to another Mac which could be brought in close
proximity with this one? If so, the easiest approach may be to use
Firewire target mode and get a second opinion using the other Mac
instead of the system software and preferences on your one.
This will be less useful if your computer is a PowerMac G4, because
Firewire target mode will only let you access the first internal hard
drive. As far as I know, all PowerMac G5 models will let you access both
internal drives via Target mode, as will the Mac Pro. This is certainly
true of later models, but I don't know the exact cutoff point.
If you don't have access to another Mac, the next option would be a
bootable system on a spare hard drive, which you can then use to see
what the internal drives look like. (Don't do this with a clone of your
main drive, as it will have cloned the problem - you need a fresh system
installation.)
You could try creating another user in System Preferences and seeing
whether you see the same behaviour for a different user. If not, then
there is something weird happening your normal user account.
Another option is to use Terminal to examine the hard drives and see
what is really happening when you delete a particular file in Finder.
The only commands you need to know to do this are 'ls' to list files
(with the -l option to get a "long" listing with details for each file)
and 'cd' to change directory.
ls -l
cd /Path/To/Folder
Another detail you need to know is that the top level of the startup
volume is simply "/" (it is the top of the entire file system), i.e.
cd /
will take you to the top level of your startup drive, then
ls -l
will give you a full directory listing of it. You will see some extra
files and folders that Finder doesn't show (e.g. bin, etc, private,
sbin, usr, var) but ignore those.
You can then go into a folder (e.g. Applications) with
cd Applications
and can go up a level to the parent folder with
cd ..
Spaces are treated as word separators, so to type in a filename which
has spaces, put it in double quotes, e.g.
cd "My Folder"
or you can precede the space with a backslash, e.g.
cd My\ Folder
The command shell suports filename completion with the Tab key, so you
can start to type in a file or folder name then press Tab, and it will
fill in the rest (as long as the are no similarly named files or folders
- in that case it will fill in the name as far as the point where the
names differ).
With multiple volumes (either partitions or separate drives), the extra
ones are located in the /Volumes folder. For example, you can get to the
top level of your "Media" volume with
cd /Volumes/Media
You might like to open two Terminal windows side by side and do
comparitive directory listings in the same folder on different volumes
to see what is really there, then try moving a file to Trash (in Finder)
and repeating the directory listings to see what changed.
--
David Empson
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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