/VOLUMES/ not being recognized properly

Question

For years i have been using NetInfo Manager to change the location of my home folder to a different partition (this facilitates easy re-installation of the OS when needed). Tonight while doing some house cleaning i noticed that my Mac OS X partition had a folder called VOLUMES present on it. Inside this folder were two alias', one to each of my partitions. I had no idea how the folder got there, and deleted it assuming they were remnants of a program gone awry. As soon as that happened the finder crashed and restarted. Upon restart all of my preferences were gone, and the OS was pointing to a newly created VOLUMES folder on the Mac OS X drive as my home folder. I went into netinfo manager and everything was fine:
When I go to Computer I can see both of my partitions, and all of the data is still there:
but for some reason my OS still thinks the folder in my Mac OS X partition is the true VOLUMES directory:
I suspect that my system has been running like this for months, and that I disturbed it by deleting those Alias', but I have no idea how to fix it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi Jeff,
fstab isn't an issue. First BACKUP the drive Internal that shows on your Desktop. Then run Disk Utility and repair the drive Internal (not repair permissions).
HFS+ is case insensitive but case preserving. The only way that the directory VOLUMES could be created is if the directory Volumes was missing from the root directory. The uppercase spelling of the directory Volumes may or may not be problematic.
OS X follows the traditional Unix file system hierarchy. An upside-down tree starting at the root and directories that branch out. Other media is mounted in the Volumes directory. The Finder presents the Carbon file system hierarchy. Many trees in the forest, each represented on the Desktop. When you look at the file system in the Finder, the Volumes folder shows the media as individual "trees" as aliases or symbolic links.
I'd be inclined to re-install the OS without preserving your present user settings. This time when you edit NetInfo
change the property home to the value /Volumes/Internal/Users/Jeff . You might put a symbolic link in the /User directory. Or you could mount Internal/Users in the /Users directory (you would need to enable fstab in NetInfo -instructions can be found at MacOSXHints).
Another option is to start your computer in single user mode. Then run a file system consistency check (Disk Utility):
fsck -fy
Mount the root file system:
mount -uw /
Make sure that you are in the root directory and create a directory saveduser:
cd /
mkdir saveduser
Navigate to the VOLUMES directory and move the directory Internal to saveduser:
cd VOLUMES
mv Internal /saveduser
Rename Internal 1 to Internal:
mv Internal\ 1 Internal
Now reboot with the command:
reboot
If all is well you can then deleted the saveduser directory. I'd first check it for any data that you might want to save.
Good Luck