external-diskhard drivehdd
I have a 2TB Seagate HDD which used to sit in my old Mac Pro. It has both the OS and my personal files on it. I want to sell my Mac but keep the drive and use it as an external HDD for my MacBook Pro. The drive has lots of movies on it and I would hate to lose them.
Folders currently on the HDD:
Can I delete everything other than the Users folder?
Enter the following command at the Terminal prompt:
defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1
Press Enter
Mount the partition 'NameOfTheMainPartitionExternalHD' if it is present and greyed out with the blue button Mount. The partition should now be visible on your desktop.
In the above example the external drive is an SD card and the usually visible partition of the external drive is gDisk. Don't touch disk1s1 (Lion) or EFI (Mavericks)
Please check the format of the partition
If the format is 'Mac OS Extended' you might check the drive for inconsistencies.
Copy your home directory over to the other drive.
Open up System Preferences then the Users & Groups pane.
Click the padlock to unlock it
Right-click on your name
Change the Home Directory to point to your newly copied one on the other drive.
NB. You might want to use a syncing program to do the copy, or create a different user to do the copy as after rebooting so that your original user isn't logged in and running anything. Makes the copy cleaner.
If you want to do this with a brand-new user, so much the better.
Alternatively, you can use your existing home directory and just sym-link everything over...
Select the folders in Finder on the new drive - ctrl-L (File menu -> Create Alias), then drag the aliases to the old drive and remove the old originals. This is less neat, but works just fine.
Best Answer
Sure you can.
Once it's no longer actually being used as your boot drive you can treat it just like any other data drive. It will let you delete anything you want - just make sure you keep the good stuff ;)
I doubt you will even get any permissions issues at all, but if you do, you can Get Info on the drive itself & check the box at the bottom to ignore ownership.