Sandbox failing oddly

[camner]

A short while ago I needed to change the size of my Sandbox, which is a partition on the same drive as my main volume ("Macintosh HD"). To do this, I cloned Macintosh HD to an external drive, and then used Disk Utility to repartition the drive. Obviously, this erased the volumes. I then recloned back to Macintosh HD from the external drive and recreated the Sandbox and booted off the Sandbox.

So far so good. A couple of days later, I rebooted my machine (from the Sandbox) and it was as if it booted with a different user (though it didn't--the user was the same, as I only have 1 user set up). All of the user preferences were no longer being respected. I got a "fresh" desktop, and the icons for Documents and Downloads were question marks.

I then recreated the Sandbox using "shared users and applications" and "smart copy" and all seemed to be well.

A couple of days later, I rebooted again from the Sandbox, and same problem. In the meantime I had rebooted at least a couple of times off of Sandbox without an issue.

Something seems to be failing here...any thoughts about what it might be? Some kind of corruption issue, it seems.

[dnanian]

That seems weird. The only thing I can think of is that the 'original drive' was, for some reason, either not present or had a different name...

[camner]

Originally Posted by dnanian

That seems weird. The only thing I can think of is that the 'original drive' was, for some reason, either not present or had a different name...

No renaming as far as I can determine (at least I didn't do anything to rename). What I noticed was that once the Sandbox wouldn't correctly boot (well, that's not quite accurate...it booted, just didn't find the appropriate user settings) rebooting again had no effect. I had to recreate the Sandbox again.

Is there a possibility that something is amiss on the "underlying drive" such that the symlinks created by SD! are getting corrupted? I did run both Disk Warrior and the disk repair facility in Disk Utility. The former showed some little stuff (such as incorrect icons), and Disk Utility showed nothing wrong.

[dnanian]

Sure, that's possible... but not likely. I really don't know why that would be unless, again, the drive wasn't available for some reason when you logged in. Very strange.

[camner]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Sure, that's possible... but not likely. I really don't know why that would be unless, again, the drive wasn't available for some reason when you logged in. Very strange.

Strange indeed. I'll keep an eye out. Correlation doesn't imply causation, of course, so it may only be coincidence that the problem occurred after I repartitioned my drive (which required a "clone/reclone back").

(I want to state explicitly what I hope is implicit is that I am emphatically NOT suggesting that SuperDuper is in any way responsible for this behavior. I don't have ANY reason to suggest this is the case.)

[dnanian]

Oh, I understand. I don't think it's SD! either. After all, a Sandbox is just a copy with symlinks, and when you're running from it we're not doing anything at all.

What's unexpected is that something would change that would 'break' the connection between the volumes.