I know that a "restore" (assuming that means Disk Utility) does intentionally skip some stuff... but those results look bizarre. A few years ago i'd be inclined to go with allocation block size as well... but i'm not so sure now (i've never seen an OSX volume that wasn't 4KB).
Artie should tell us about these two disks (format, etc.), perhaps with
diskutil info /Volumes/*
...or something. [i.e., replace the asterisk with the real name]
I looked briefly for some command that shows allocation block size, but i don't find anything handy. [it might need to be scripted.]
--
I'd almost be inclined to think either one disk is not HFS+ journaled, or it needs repair.
Late EDIT:
>> $ sudo du -xhd1 /
:
>> 4.0K /Volumes
:
The identical 4k size for both /Volumes folders seems to rule out the allocation block theory. [that 4k is probably the symlink to / which usually takes a single byte ("/"), therefore consuming a single allocation block.]
If both volumes pass muster with Disk Utility (or preferably DiskWarrior), then some method of determining the file differences is the way to go. A GUI folder sync with a preview feature (such as
ChronoSync) could display what items differ (in just the two /sbin folders for example). Or a command line attempt might look like:
sudo diff -qr /Volumes/source/sbin/ /Volumes/restore/sbin/ |grep '^Only in'
The grep is just to skip over
files which do exist on both sides, but have different contents. [other tools such as
rsync -nrxv --delete could also be used, if done with care (i.e., do
not remove the
-n). But again,
rsync will also display any files which exist on both sides, but have different contents (unless there's an option i'm not familiar with... in fact i bet there is one, so i'll look for it). Meanwhile, go with
diff or a GUI folder sync utility.]
