I’m aware not everyone has the same setup as I do, so I’m not sure if this is even applicable. But I’ll share it anyway in case people are experiencing the same issue.

So I’ve decided to “upgrade” the Hackintosh ¹ My main desktop/work computer to Snow Leopard (SL). I was hesitant to leave Leopard (especially for the work machine) because of this bug I experienced in my MacBook Pro.

Primer

So for those who are confused: I basically have a Drobo where I pretty much store all my data. And I need to have the computer(s) connect to it persistently since I’m a symlink whore; from the keychain, to IM logs, to my iTunes library – everything has been migrated to the Drobo and simply accessed by the system via symlinks.

The reason I chose the symlink approach is because I want to be able to store all critical data outside of the actual computers… so in the event of a system crash… the data is on the Drobo (which, if you researched about it, has fault tolerance built in) ² Granted the only point of failure that I would have to worry about is the failure of the Drobo itself.

In the video you saw, this was when my Time Capsule died on me, that’s why I was connecting to the desktop. Normally, I have it connected to a base station – and have all the computers in turn connect to it. It used to be the TC, but now it’s the Airport Extreme (AE).

Going back to the issue

It’s worth mentioning that this “bug” only appears in Snow Leopard. When I got my AE, and reverted to my usual network topology; the Hackintosh (Leopard) could access the drives fine, but the bug persisted in the laptop.

Thankfully, I was able to work around that bug by accessing the NAS via SMB (Samba) protocol. But I noticed that the protocol is good for general file access, but not as efficient as AFP. AFP for some reason beyond my comprehension, works faster it seems (which is especially noticeable when I’m using iTunes, or doing my photo post-processing sessions)

Going Snow Leopard exclusively

So that’s what kept me from upgrading for the most part; that, and I really wasn’t in the mood to take the time to do another Hackintosh install for the heck of it (it’s more “involved” than one would hope it would be). But after messing up the boot partition after installing Windows 7, I thought I’d bite the bullet and do everything in one go (spent most of the weekend on that).

So I upgraded, and sure enough it experienced the same bug. Even worse is that, now when I connect it directly to the computer (and not via AE) it would do that alias error thing before I could access it at all. That was unacceptable! Also, since then, the Drobo has expanded from it’s single 2TB volume to 4TBs (split into two 2TB volumes) – and for some reason the second volume was working fine!

So that led me to believe that there was also something wrong with the filesystem of the drive instead of the actual OS. It seemed that SL was more “particular” than Leopard – which is why it thew errors where Leopard would just handle it like a champ, albeit inefficiently (not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. It’s similar to say comparing AS3 to AS2 in flash programming).

The “Fix”

So I googled and googled – and finally came across this gem:

Sure there’s a “fix” with Apple software. You’ll need to install the Developer Tools (XCode) from the Snow Leopard Install DVD, though.

After you’ve done that, you can use SetFile to clear the Alias bit from the misbehaving Volume:

/usr/bin/SetFile -a a /Volumes/<YourExternalDriveName>

Please keep in mind that using this command might be dangerous, so don’t try this solution unless you feel confident on the command line. (Refer to the online documentation on SetFile or invoke /usr/bin/SetFile without arguments for more info on the command.)

I actually didn’t do it that way. The first suggestion was to use an app called Path Finder, where that particular “bit” they were talking about is easily (and safely) set via its GUI.

Long story short, setting that Alias bit fixed everything! Now I could access all volumes of the Drobo both directly [via USB] and persistently [via the network using AFP] – and all my OSes are on Snow Leopard to boot!

Good times!