MacOS – Copy to external HDD fails if copy dialog is in background

In your configuration, you have unix extensions = no which is fine, but that is why symbolic links on the server are showing up as folders and not aliases. In this mode the server resolves the symbolic links and the client never sees them. If the client tries to create a symbolic link, the server actually generates an alias file, not a host-OS symbolic link. Reasons for this include security (preventing someone from getting access to /etc/passwd on the server by creating a symbolic link to it) and client compatibility, as OS X and Windows and Unix have slightly different ideas about what constitutes a symbolic link but they pretty much agree on what is a directory or a file.

Permissions issues with SAMBA are complex, so it's not clear that you do not have a permissions issue. Likewise symbolic like resolving is complex, so it is not clear that what you are doing should, in theory work, and there's always the possibility of a bug (most likely in the SAMBA server).

When accessing a SAMBA server from a Mac, these identities and permissions are involved:

• The Mac User you are logged into the Mac as
• The SAMBA user you are logged into the SAMBA server as
• The SMABA server host OS user you get converted to
• Unix-style file permissions
• For NTFS and HFS+, associated file-system ACLs

So even though you have provided a lot of information, it's still not clear that you are not having permissions problems. The fact that you can mv and cp on the server (using what account?) does not mean you do not have a permissions problem preventing you from doing it on the client (using what accounts and with what effective account on the server?).

If the server is supporting ACLs and since you have options like inherit permissions = yes and inherit acls = yes set there could be some kind of ACL problem that is only allowing read access to directories accessed via symbolic links. There are several other avenues of investigation based on the server configuration.

I would really expect you should be able to find more information in the SAMBA server logs than you have communicated. They should give you a much better sense of exactly what is being denied.

For what it is worth, I tried to duplicate your setup using an Ubuntu 12.04 host as the SAMBA server and could not reproduce your problem. Symbolic links worked for me as expected.

You can't run Bootcamp from an external hard drive, but you can install Windows via a virtual machine (MV Ware or Parallels are the best known). If you install Windows on the internal drive you have the option of booting from it directly or using one of the VM machines while running Mac OS.

As for the hard drive size you should consider the 768GB drive if possible. The drive space goes quickly and isn't upgradable. (Well, it is, but AFAIK nobody makes larger or faster replacement drives.)

The OSs run independently of each other, so you don't have to worry about cross-contamination. When running BootCamp you can't even see the Macintosh partition.

In my experience it works as well as can be expected considering the limitations of running software on hardware that wasn't specifically designed for it.

Good Luck.