Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Move Mac OS X Users folder to secondary hard drive

I recently purchased a new 27" iMac and had it built with both an internal SSD disk and internal HD disk. I wanted to keep all of my applications and OS on the SSD while my user folders on the HD since it has so much more capacity. Here's how I was able to do this:

Restart Mac to Recovery Partition, use Terminal to copy Users folder to secondary drive and then add symlink on primary drive to secondary drive. In my directions below you need to aware of the following:

  • The primary disk drive was renamed to “Macintosh SSD”
  • The secondary disk drive was renamed to “Macintosh HD”
  • My user account short name is troym
  • My user account was the first one created on the system, so the system ID is 501

OK, so here’s the steps that I performed to complete this task:

  • Restart Mac, holding down Command + R on the keyboard (I had to do this four times before it worked)
  • Select your language
  • Click on the “Utilities” menu
  • Click on the “Terminal” menu option
ditto /Volumes/Macintosh\ SSD/Users /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users 
rm -rf /Users
ln -s /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users /Volumes/Macintosh\ SSD/Users
cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users
chown -R 501:staff troym

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