Alias Question Pertaining to Duplicate volumes

[jreffner]

When I duplicate (not back up) my OS X drive (internal & SCSI) to my external firewire drive, I create a bootable OS X firewire drive. The purpose of this is to have a perfect duplicate in case the original OS X drive becomes damaged (essentially using it as a back up). The second purpose is to boot from the duplicate firewire drive (which does work) so I can use the utilities such as Drive 10 by Micromat and/or Norton Utilities to fix or optimize the original internal OS X drive. This is easier that making new bootable OS X CDs everytime the utilities or the Mac OS changes.

 

 

 

The question then that the Micromat guy and I need to is if: "The answer to that question would depend on whether the aliases and symbolic links point to the original files (internal SCSI drive) or to the copies on the new volume (external firewire drive)."

 

 

 

We ask this because the Norton on the duplicae FW drive will not do anything to the original OS X drive whereas Drive 10 will examine and fix the original drive, but can not optimize it. It is unable to unmount the original drive and hence can not defrag it. The Micromat guy tells me that this is because the permissions are wrong (which I highly doubt) or that files are still open. So, I'm wondering why files on my original internal OS X drive would be open when I'm booted from my external firewire OS X duplicte drive. Do the aliases and symbolic links on the duplicated firewire drive still point to the original internal OS X drive? Either way, how can I (before I optimize using drive 10) close all of the files?

 

 

 

Thanks so very much for helping us out!

 

 

 

Jim Reffner

 

 

 

P.s. I'm using the latest versions of everything. I'm using Retrospect Desktop on a G4 800 DP.

 

 

[AmyJ]

What happens if you boot off your system CD or your drive utility CD? Are you able to properly perform these tests?

[jreffner]

Amy,

 

 

 

If I boot from the drive 10 CD (which has OS X.1.4) the Drive 10 app on the CD can easily fix any and all drives without a problem. When I try to Optimize or rebuild the directory of either the internal OS X drive or the external FireWire OS X Duplicate drive while booted from the other one, it always crashes as it tries to unmount the other OS X volume.

 

 

 

Does that tell you anything?

 

 

 

Thanks so much for noticing my post and for taking the time to reply.

 

 

 

Jim