Installing on a second hard drive

[rxninja]

I have a functional and reliable Hackintosh that I've been using for a little while now. The thing is I have a 128GB SSD boot drive and a 1TB secondary hard drive and I recently realized I've been installing everything on the 128GB, which I intended only for programs I wanted a speed boost on (Photoshop, Parallels...probably Diablo III). I finally got around to installing Office for Mac 2008, but in the wizard it recognizes my second drive, Storage, but says I need 10.4.9 or higher. I'm running Lion 10.7.3, so this was a definite wtf moment.

I posted in 10.7.x support and was directed here:

http://martinbay.net/how-to-move-user-folder/

I followed the steps to the letter, tried it, and nothing happened. Tried installing Office again, no go. I thought, "Hey, maybe a Windows program will install over there!" I've been using Parallels with W7 and it works beautifully, so I gave it a shot with Steam. The installer didn't even recognize that there was a drive there, so no dice.

I thought maybe it really did need a second install of Lion on that drive in order to work. I probably wouldn't need Multibeast because it's not booting to that drive, so I re-downloaded the Lion installer on my laptop, transfered it over to Storage, and installed. Everything worked, so I tried installing Office again. "This installation requires 10.4.9 or higher..."

So I'm stuck. Moving the Users folder did nothing. Installing Lion did nothing. I can transfer things to and from with no problem. In fact, I moved the Guild Wars 2 installer there before installing and it worked just fine. What do I need to do to be able to install applications on both drives?

 

[Ratteler]

I would recommend LibreOffice. Unless you're working with heavy duty enterprise level office work, there is no need for M$ Office.

For basic Word Processing, LibreOffice and OpenOffice produce much cleaner documents even when exported to RTF for things like E-Book and Layout in InDesign.

I'm not THAT into spreadsheets, but I did design a set of spreadsheets to do the accounting at my local nutrition center using only OpenOffice.

Give it a try and see if it meets your needs.

 

[rxninja]

Thanks for the suggestion, but that is actually totally unrelated to my problem. I can't install a damn thing, Office or otherwise, on my second hard drive.

Also, I like my Office for Mac 2008. I use Word for papers (the citation manager is brilliant), Excel for my gradebook and my Etsy expense tables, and then I move to iWork's Keynote for my class lecture slides. I've got a good process going on my laptop, but I'd like to move to my more powerful desktop with much more screen real estate. That second hard drive issue is being a pain in the ass.

 

[eelhead]

Did you open disk utility and make sure the drive is formatted for OS X use.

Also you can have a look at Lnx2Mac's guide on setting the user folder onto the 1TB drive. It's the guide I used and I havent had any issues since doing this.

http://lnx2mac.blogspot.com/2010/09/mov ... ition.html

Also Lifehacker
http://lifehacker.com/5254923/how-to-mo ... ther-drive

 

[rxninja]

I replied to this but either my post must have gotten eaten by internet goblins or I closed out before I clicked submit. Regardless, here's the update.

My /Users folder is currently located on the Storage drive. I checked in my Accounts page on System Settings and it's definitely there. I even did repair permissions to make sure it was all working properly and it seems to be.

As an experiment, I tried dragging some of my Humble Bundle games over to Storage to see if they'd run from that drive. They do. I tried using an installer to install things on that drive and, oddly enough, it still doesn't recognize that drive as a place where things can be installed. Why? It's a secret to everyone, I guess.

I went ahead and installed Office for Mac 2008 on my SSD, then, just to see if it would work, dragged it over to Storage and ran it from there. Everything worked just fine. No, the installer still wouldn't allow me to install there even though it detects the drive, calculates space, and everything. Derp.

So my current workaround is to install to the SSD and drag to the 1TB post-installation. I even made a Games folder there and used a symbolic link, created with this http://www.macworld.com/article/1153437 ... rvice.html, to put the folder into Applications all neat-like so it pops up like a real Applications folder.

It's not the prettiest setup and I'm still baffled as to why installers won't install onto Storage, yet the apps can be dragged there and work perfectly, but I've been told never to seek an elegant solution when a dirty hack will functionally suit the purpose at hand. I'll take it.

 

[talisman]

How many partitions do you have on the 1TB drive? What is the type of each partition (GUID, MBR, etc.)?

 

[rxninja]

I have one Mac OS Extended (Journaled) GUID read/write partition. I barely know what that means, but I at least know where to find the information within Disk Utility.