Ouch! That sounds nasty. It sounds like something got corrupted somewhere. Unfortunately it sounds like something completely different than what this blog post is about, and I’m not sure what might be the matter, off hand.

I’d try the Apple forums for starters. If you have your install disks still, you can try doing a recovery also.

I wish I could be more helpful. Mysterious errors that defy Google happen. Regardless, I wish you my sincere wishes for a speedy resolution.

“Could not get Darwin_user_dir, falling back to NSTemporaryDirectory()”

Because of this, I couldn’t run the Mac OS. I am frustrated, and have no clue whatsoever on how to fix this. Any help?

You, too, eh? War story time.

I haven’t dug into system internals enough to know if there’s a simple way to tell OS X to use a separate partition for temp directories.

Interestingly, /etc /tmp and /var are all symlinks into /private, which appears to be marked with extended attributes. I don’t know enough about BSD-specific intricacies to know what’s going on, but the per-user configurability make me suspect that union filesystem features may be used — but that’s pure speculation.