Rebecca, solebul

Hello all,

To preface, anyone with decent unix skills can help me out.

I recently purchased a refurbished macbook pro and decided to give it a SSD. I want to have some extra space so I kept the original HD in by swapping it with the superdrive and making that an external. Essentially, I followed these directions.

Anyway, to make a long story short. The SSD ain't huge so it's recommended to keep the system files and apps etc on the SSD, but the rest of the files on the HD.

(Surprisingly) everything work fine, except iTunes when it tries to sync. Another user "hawflakes" posted the same problem and his solution too:

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"OS X users planning to keep your old drive and upgrade to an SSD.

I kept my old drive and used Super Duper to clone everything except my user directories.

Everything was fine until I tried to sync in iTunes.

I got a cryptic message about permissions. Nothing worked until i found:

[support.apple.com]

You *must* have a /Users/Shared directory or you will get weird iTunes permissions-related errors.

My fix was to simply symlink to my old one on /Volumes/myolddisk/Users/Shared "
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So this guy created a symlink which he says fixed the permissions problem. I looked up how to create a symlink, and it seems pretty simple at face value. My question is about procedure.

In Terminal, do I simply write: ln -s /Volumes/[old Hd name]/Users/Shared /Volumes/[new SSD name]/Users/Shared ?

Is that what Mr. hawflakes is saying? Anyway, and light you can shed will be greatly appreciated.

OWC Technical Support advised after my SSD being slow, not to clone as this slows down the SSD to normal drive speeds. Suggestion was to format the SSD, partition even if only one partition, do a clean install of Snow Leopard from the install DVD and then use Migration Assistant to transfer folders, applications, network settings etc over the the SSD.

The syntax is ln -s source target. So to create a link TO your old directory, you would type:

ln -s <path_to_where_your_stuff_is> <path_to_name_of_your_new_link>

So, to create an link called "/Volumes/SSD/Users/Shared" that points to "/Volumes/HDD/Users/Shared" type:

ln -s /Volumes/HDD/Users/Shared /Volumes/SSD/Users/Shared

Your best bet is still to just do a fresh installation of OS X to the SSD, and then reconfigure the HDD by copying your data to it. You will run quicker and can avoid a bunch of redundant links, orphaned files and needless confusion. Good luck.