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Recover some hard drive space via pdisk
Authored by: deleted_user18 on May 30, '05 08:24:29AM

How often do your format your sytem poartition? I did this only once in four years.

There are still dependancies between your system and your /Users directory! Only in a perfect world /Users is totally independent from the rest of the system. In other words, formatting your system partition and mounting your old /Users will give you propably some strange errors (and the you want to format your system partion again...).



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Recover some hard drive space via pdisk
Authored by: gvitale on May 30, '05 08:40:51AM

Not true, sorry...
I have moved my home directory to a separate partition back in 10.1 and I had no troubles installing 10.2, 10,3 and 10.4 (not the one yo are referring anyways...)



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Recover some hard drive space via pdisk
Authored by: deleted_user18 on May 30, '05 10:28:11AM

In your home folder is at least your ~/Library/Preferences/ folder. Files in there have settings depending of the software version and your system configuration. For example: A software stores the screen position of your software, on a different Mac you have a smaller resolution. It now depends on the application if it can deal with the situation and switch to standard window postions or just crash... Yo get the picture?



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Recover some hard drive space via pdisk
Authored by: greed on May 30, '05 11:17:47AM

...and well-formed applications will put their system-specific preferences in ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost.

The filename convention is the same as for regular preferences, but the en0 MAC address is placed before the ".plist" in the name, like so:

com.apple.windowserver.000d93b2112c.plist

As a frequent-iBook-Logic-Board-Replacer, I've gotten really good at swapping the files around when en0 gets a new MAC every 3 or 4 months.



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Recover some hard drive space via pdisk
Authored by: deleted_user18 on May 30, '05 04:30:14PM

Oh thanks for the information. This is new to me, I always wondered what ByHost directories meant. So in theory there is a way to do a clean swap.



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Recover some hard drive space via pdisk
Authored by: gvitale on May 31, '05 04:18:20AM

You're happy now?



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Recover some hard drive space via pdisk
Authored by: chucky23 on May 30, '05 10:26:12AM

Yup. It's quite easy. We're talking about a single symbolic link.



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Recover some hard drive space via pdisk
Authored by: jesboat on Jun 20, '05 04:13:39PM

Wow, you and gvitale are really arguing here. (I say as I throw in my $0.02, oh well.)

I reformat my system partition with every major OS X release, and maybe once in between. I've never encountered a problem with my ~ being grumpy between installations [1].

[1] I've only tried going from an older version of OS X to the same version or a newer version, which means it makes sense I've never had any problems: my ~ just follows the standard upgrade path for preferences and such.

Jesboat

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With no walls or fences on the 'net, who needs Windows or Gates?



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