Adding my old system hard drive home to new external SSD system drive?

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bruxxx Author

Level 1

45 points

Adding my old system hard drive home to new external SSD system drive?

Current system is a 2008 iMac with changed out internel 2TB drive.

My current system is working, disk fine, hardware fine, it can boot and run OK.

The disk is slow and filling up, so I added an external SSD on the FW800 port

to offload the system software and speek things up a little bit.

SSD system drive works fine, in fact screams under Yosemite on the

freshly installed system.

The problem is that when I go back to point my login account's home

directory to the home directory on the original disk, even though I have

admin privileges, and even though the UID, user ID of the old account

is the same as my newly installed home directory, the files, which I can

see, are greyed out and I cannot access them? That is, I cannot access

my old home directory in order to point my new home directory to it.

How can I use my old system drive as my new home directory,

especially since the SSD is so much smaller and will not really

work as my system drive?

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1), 24 inch

Posted on Apr 28, 2015 10:47 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

bruxxx Author

Level 1

45 points

Apr 28, 2015 10:56 AM in response to bruxxx

Sorry, solved this.

I was doing this as a pseudo root account that did not have access

to my home dir on the old drive. But I did not need that just to point

the system to that directory ... so ... been a while ... working now,

thanks.

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Answer 2

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Apr 28, 2015 11:01 AM in response to bruxxx

You should have used the same username and password on the SSD system as you use on the HDD. Change that on one or the other.

Short Name- OS X- How to change user account name or home directory name

For Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks

Boot to the Recovery HD:

Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

When the menubar appears select Terminal from the Utilities menu.

Enter resetpassword at the prompt and press RETURN. Follow

instructions in the dialog window that will appear.

Or see:

Reset a Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Password

OS X Mountain Lion- Reset a login password,

OS X Mavericks- Solve password problems,

OS X Lion- Apple ID can be used to reset your user account password.

I assume you know how to re-direct the Home folder.

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