Leopard eats my /home!
Apple released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard weeks ago, and today, I’ve just upgraded my aging PowerBook with it. It took nearly 3 hours to complete the installation.
I have a “home” folder at the root level, and to my horror, Leopard has eaten it!
I am not sure what Apple going to do with that folder, I though Darwin and FreeBSD didn’t really use it — it is supposed to be some Linux thingy, storing all of the user’s data there.
I can’t remove it, even with the root access via a terminal:
rm -f /home
I can’t see anything in it, I can’t create folder in it, I can’t copy any files into it.
I have tons and tons of files under that folder and they were all gone! The folder size is near zero. I was regretted big time for the upgrade – although I have sufficient backup.
So I have to restore it back from my backup, so I have renamed the folder to “home_disabled”. The system didn’t complain.
Just to make sure the entire system didn’t go down with it, I rebooted the system and … it created a new /home folder.
I was so frustrated because it means I have to abandon the use of home folder. The impact was great because my Linux servers use that folder, and I need to link and map things back to it – or at least trying to simulate file system in Linux in order to test my development codes.
Just went I trying to empty my Trash after I tossed the “home_disabled” folder into it, I noticed that the Trash empty process was taking way too long to count the files. I stop the process, and open up “home_disabled” – all my previous files were back!
Leopard didn’t eat it, but it was as good as eaten after all, as I have almost deleted it.
I was consider lucky to discover it back again, thru some unexpected, barbarian process. I truly think Apple should have warned about the /home folder stunts before installation, and offer a way to disable it post-installation.
And when I was trying to send SMS using my address book, I realized that the Bluetooth option wasn’t there anymore, ever. I was like “huh?”
The Intel chip has made Apple thinks more like a PC these days? How can they remove such an essential feature? Another big letdown.
It has been a long day. I feel like going to back to 10.4 tomorrow 
Update: I didn’t switch back. There was a quick fix to the /home folder. Apparently Apple decided to use that folder for Automounter, and thus the fix was to change the setting at /etc/auto_master. My system didn’t choke after I’ve made the change, yeay.