Sandbox failing oddly

[camner]

I'll try checking that...thanks.

Well, given that you've said "you'd notice if the symlink were broken during normal operations" and "nothing would change a symlink into an alias" I'm left scratching my head and concluding that somehow it is either in the shut down or bootup process that the symlink is altered. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but then again, I'm way over my head here.

[camner]

Well, I'm absolutely stymied!

Yesterday I remade my Sandbox. I did nothing in the last 24 hours other than use the computer normally. No installs, no mucking around with Time Machine (though TM was turned on and ran as it should), no nothing. Then before going to bed, I hibernated my machine (Mac Pro).

Today, I wake the machine up from hibernation, and decide to reboot. Bam! The user folder symlink is gone, and in its place a new user folder with just a Library folder inside. So the Sandbox is hosed. The timestamp on the new user folder is at shutdown/reboot time. Can't tell which one. The symlink seems to be destroyed either by the shutdown or the reboot process.

All this started to happen after I repartitioned my drive and cloned my main drive off and back on after the repartition (might be coincidence...I've done that before without a problem).

What kind of thing can possibly destroy a symlink upon shutdown or reboot?

Any thoughts about how I can pursue this further? I can roll back my drive to a backup from about 5 weeks ago, but that would force me to do some rather tedious reinstalls of stuff I've done since then.

[dnanian]

Something has got to be overwriting the symlink. Maybe something that's running at startup time. I really don't know, and I don't know how you'd find out.

[camner]

OK. Thanks very much. You've taken the time to reply promptly to my emails, and I truly appreciate the help and support. I'll go off on my own now and see what I can figure out. I hope I don't have to rebuild the entire machine...that takes such a long time (maybe it's my excuse to upgrade to Snow Leopard, something I wanted to wait until the .3 or .4 release for).