Renamed system folder

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Level 1

99 points

Renamed system folder

I did perhaps a dumb thing: I have two boot partitions on my macbook pro: one Yosemite, and one Mountain Lion (10.8.5). To disable the mountain lion drive temporarily, I renamed the system folder SystemOLD while I was running Yosemite.

Today I went back to take the OLD suffix off while in Yosemite, and there was a new System folder on the Mountain Lion drive. I tried to delete it, but it keeps getting recreated before I can rename my system folder. There's only one folder in the Library folder, "Caches" with the com.apple.kext.caches folder inside of that and Startup inside that.

Is my Mountain Lion boot drive gorked? I can access all my documents of course but I'd rather be able to boot back in.

thanks

Tom

Posted on Mar 26, 2015 12:24 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Mar 26, 2015 12:41 PM in response to Thomas Ernst

Boot from a backup drive or from the other system in order to rename the folder. You cannot do that while booted from the system.

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Answer 2

Thomas Ernst Author

Level 1

99 points

Mar 26, 2015 2:11 PM in response to Kappy

"Today I went back to take the OLD suffix off while in Yosemite, and there was a new System folder on the Mountain Lion drive"

As I stated, I am booted in the Yosemite drive, and trying to change the Mountain Lion drive.

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Mar 26, 2015 2:36 PM in response to Thomas Ernst

You stated you rename the system folder while running Yosemite. So, here's what you will need to do. Open the Terminal application in your Utilities folder. At the prompt paste the following:

sudo rm -Rf /Volumes/Mountain\ Lion/System ; sudo mv -f /Volumes/Mountain\ Lion/SystemOLD /Volumes/Mountain\ Lion/System

Press RETURN. Enter admin password when prompted. It will not echo to the window. Press RETURN, again.

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Answer 4

Thomas Ernst Author

Level 1

99 points

Mar 26, 2015 2:48 PM in response to Kappy

excellent--thanks very much!!

--t

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