Tag Archives: timezone

“So, How’s the Patient?” You Might Ask…

The answer “not well” comes to mind.

So all the copying and cloning appeared to go well. The new 2TB drive is in place, the O/S has been moved to the 1TB drive, and the most persnickety apps — iTunes, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom — all seemed to still have their marbles intact.

And then I noticed the time in the menubar. It was wrong. By several hours. I opened the system preference panel for the clock, and noticed that I was on GMT. Permanently. No matter where I clicked on the little world map, I always ended up with my timezone set to GMT.

After a bunch of Googling, I was led to some information about the symbolic link that dealt with the timezone. I was just gonna force it by creating a new link, but that’s something I don’t do everyday, and decided I should look it up. But after typing man ln, the machine proceeded to tell me it couldn’t fulfill my request. And I thought, well who does it think I am? A quick whoami, and I was told permission denied. Another quick su, followed by a more trepidatious whoami, and was told again permission denied. WTF?

I took a look at the ownership of whoami and others, and found that either (and sometimes both) the user and group were numeric rather than the expect root, wheel, etc. This was really bad juju, and I decided it was time to repair permissions through the Disk Utility. It told me it had found some things, and would have that taken care of in 12 minutes. Cool.

It’s now been well over three hours (with the utility expecting it’ll take another two hours), and filenames are streaming by (largely files in /Library, so far), with complaints about user, group and permissions, apparently all being repaired. I’ve gone to Terminal, and confirmed that it appears to be fixing things, so I’m inclined to let it do its thing. However, I really wonder what went south in the simple disk cloning. I used Carbon Copy Cloner (which has never failed me), and things appeared to work well — although the cloning took about three hours, which was unexpected.

The bad news is that I’ve already skrogged my old boot disk. Things looked like they were working, and I had planned to move my iTunes library over there, so I blasted it in preparation for its new purpose in life. Potentially, this may have been a bad move. It shouldn’t have influenced what’s going on now, but it would’ve been a lifeline that is now unavailable.

Stay tuned for more on the ongoing progress of Doc Oc….