Planet Quark

This week I replaced an aging iBook with an aging PowerBook — don’t ask why, it’s just something we do. Being cool and smart, I used Apple’s Migration Assistant to move everything from the old Mac to the new Mac. Then I made the fatal error of renaming the hard drive.

The previous name suited the old Mac well — DTM iBook G4. Unfortunately, it made no sense for the new Mac, so I renamed it to the default Mac name: Macintosh HD. This sent Suitcase X1 into deep confusion, with seemingly duplicate fonts and mostly lost ones. (I use Suitcase in its not-recommended mode — not using the Vault, but rather letting Suitcase keep track of the original fonts on the hard drive. We add and remove fonts so often that using the Vault is too confining.)

After pondering the problem, I remembered FontNuke. This gem of a free utility let me delete all the font caches on the old Mac (142 of them!), and also reset Suitcase to its original state.

After a restart of the Mac, I dragged all our fonts onto Suitcase. Success! All the fonts worked again.

Lesson learned: be careful about renaming your Mac’s hard drive. While it doesn’t matter in most cases, in some cases it can ruin your day.

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