Broken symlinks

[ritalin]

I just had some bad luck. I was having some problems with my current 10.4.10 install on my iHack, so I decided to do a clean install back to a known good 10.4.8 setup. No problem because I keep a recent backup of all my documents, OU work, music, movies, pictures... all on a firewire hard drive.

So I erase the drive in my iHack, do a clean 10.4.8 install and start to restore my system from the backup firewire hard drive. You can probably guess what happened next...

About 5 mins into the restore the firewire drive disappeared from the desktop. No matter what I did I couldn't get OS X to see the drive. So I've removed the 2.5" disk from the firewire enclosure, bought a 40pin IDE cable and a 3.5"/2.5" convertor. With the disk connected to the M/B IDE connector it still cannot be seen, even in the BIOS. I've put the disk in the fridge but it makes no difference, I guess it's FUBAR.

On the plus side I did figure out what the original problem with my 10.4.10 install. It was being caused by a broken symbolic link to resolv.conf in /private/var/run. Here is the terminal command to find broken symlinks:

sudo find / -type l | (while read FN ; do test -e "$FN" || ls -ld "$FN"; done)

So I didn't need to do the clean install after all, what a bummer.

[aquamac]

Hi Rits,

That sounds like the sort of thing that happens to me, to use your words, what a bummer! I had a similar situation the other week. Do you remember the problem you first brought to our attention involving the file sharing check box needing re-checking every time you rebooted in 10.4.9. Well 10.4.10 brought this problem back again, so I looked back here to remind myself what the fix was and re applied it. The result, for some unknown reason, was a non booting system. So I thought, not a problem, I will back up from my secondary internal drive, it was about then I remembered I had been messing around with Leo on that one and it was no longer bootable. Hmm, mental note to self, always check your back up options! I have to commiserate with you though, yours was just bad luck. By the way, how many broken links did you find?

[ritalin]

admin said:

Hi Rits,
By the way, how many broken links did you find?

Somewhere near 100 on my system. Mostly unimportant: old deleted pkgs, missing network drives... etc
e.g. /Library/Receipts/iPhoto_604.pkg/Contents/Resources/iPhoto_604.sizes -> ./Archive.sizes

Only one that actually caused me problems.

/private/etc/resolv.conf ->/private/var/run/resolv.conf

It was stopping SLIRP from finding the DNS on my network.

The problem you just mentioned "involving the file sharing check box needing re-checking every time you rebooted". That was a broken symbolic link as-well.

/usr/sbin/AppleFileServer -> /System/Library/CoreServices/AppleFileServer.app/Contents/MacOS/AppleFileServer

There should be an easy way to repair these in Finder but there isn't. In fact, Finder can't create Symbolic links and it doesn't even identify them. Finder displays symlinks as aliases, which they are not. It can how ever create aliases, which the unix commands that OS X relies on can't use. A recipe for trouble if ever I saw one.

Okay, the hole symlink / alias thing didn't loose my photo album. That was my fault for not having two backups , but I can't help feeling a little miffed.