RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

So today my PowerBook made very bad noises and started smoking… Literally. I am guessing that the power board died on it so it’s off to Apple for repair.

In the mean time I decided to swap the hard drive out and mount it on my old G4 server so I could keep working. I figured I would just symlink /Users/rj to the external drive at /Volumes/zulu/Users/rj and life would be good. I found out that with filevault there are some tricks you need to do before this will work.

The first thing you need to do is enable FileVault on the existing target account that you are going to use. You might want to make sure you have a clean empty home folder otherwise it may take a while to do this first step. Once you have the account setup you need to go into netinfo and modify the “home_loc” key under the /users/ tree. This will have the path to the file vault disk image and you just need to update it to the real path of the file. The thing to remember is that it will not follow symlinks. You will also want to make sure that your password on the account matches the one for the FileVault image. Once you do this you should be able to login with access to everything that is on the filevault image!