Since I did an archive & install of Leopard on my laptop, I have all these extra folders shown along with the normal folders (Applications, Library, Previous System, System, Users) on my hard drive. "etc", "tmp", and "var" are aliases. Are all of these folders necessary? Can I delete them? Why are they there?
Yes if you want that system to be bootable. Usually they are invisible. It says that drive's .hidden file is not working. That typically only works if the drive is the boot drive. If it is the current boot drive, you can make them invisible again using the freeware http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html
I found the files on my Tiger disk. SetHidden and hidden_MacOS9
Those instructions do not apply to the Leopard DVD.
I can email them if you supply an address. Do NOT use any of your main email addresses - use a throwaway address at yahoo, etc.
The uncompressed size of the pair is 40K.
Compressed they are 8K
On Francine's website -
http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/toovisible.html - there is a bit about using TextEdit to create a file called
.hidden. This is how I solved the issue.
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bin, etc, sbin, tmp, usr, var folders
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