If you do any sort of web development on your Mac, you are likely to have a /home directory on your drive. In my case, I have a /home directory with a bunch of symbolic links to directories in my user directories since these then allow me to match the directory structure on my production web servers. I know that Zend, and perhaps other development tools, also make use of the /home directory.

If you install Leopard, you are going to be in for a very rude surprise. Once you install Leopard, the /home directory will still be there, but it will be completely empty, and you'll be unable to figure out what is going on, nor will you be able to recreate what was in there previously.

I have no idea WTF Apple was thinking here, but the good news is that your files are still there and you can easily fix this problem with the /home directory. Here's how:

Edit the /etc/auto_master file. You'll need admin privileges to do this like so: sudo vi /etc/auto_master. Here are the contents of the file:

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master            # Use directory service
/net                    -hosts          -nobrowse,nosuid
/home                   auto_home       -nobrowse
/Network/Servers        -fstab
/-                      -static

All you need to do is comment out the line that starts /home by putting a pound sign (#) in front of it. When you are done, here's how the file should look:

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master            # Use directory service
/net                    -hosts          -nobrowse,nosuid
#/home                   auto_home       -nobrowse
/Network/Servers        -fstab
/-                      -static

Once you do this, you need to restart your machine.

If you do this, you'll completely recover your /home directory after installing Leopard.