Submit Feedback
Legacy Knowledge Base
Published Sep. 10, 2025

Starting Up a Liferay Bundle From an External Drive on a Mac

Written By

Liferay Support

How To articles are not official guidelines or officially supported documentation. They are community-contributed content and may not always reflect the latest updates to Liferay DXP. We welcome your feedback to improve How To articles!

While we make every effort to ensure this Knowledge Base is accurate, it may not always reflect the most recent updates or official guidelines.We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to reach out with any feedback or concerns.

Legacy Article

You are viewing an article from our legacy "FastTrack" publication program, made available for informational purposes. Articles in this program were published without a requirement for independent editing or verification and are provided"as is" without guarantee.

Before using any information from this article, independently verify its suitability for your situation and project.

Whether it's for demo-ing Liferay or for other purposes, you may at some point wish to run a Liferay bundle from an external hard drive. Most of the time, this is straightforward. When starting 6.1.20 on a Macintosh, however, you may run into an error if your external drive is not formatted correctly (see below).

SEVERE: Error deploying configuration descriptor /liferay-portal-6.1.20-ee-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/conf/Catalina/localhost/._ROOT.xml
Aug 8, 2012 2:20:44 PM org.apache.tomcat.util.digester.Digester fatalError
SEVERE: Parse Fatal Error at line 1 column 1: Content is not allowed in prolog.
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Content is not allowed in prolog.
 
The root of the issues is the "." in the "._ROOT.xml". The problem is with the format of the drive which is causing the "." (essentially an empty file) files on Mac OSX

Resolution

If the external drive is formatted in the "ExFAT" format you may run into this issue. Reformatting the drive to "Mac OS Extended(Journaled)" should resolve the problem and you should be able to start the bundle.

Additional Information

a href="http://mattdanger.net/2010/01/dealing-with-_-files-in-mac-os-x/">http://mattdanger.net/2010/01/dealing-with-_-files-in-mac-os-x/

Information: This information is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute Liferay Liferay Subscription Services recommendation nor endorsement. Liferay also does not assume any responsibility for any instructions herein or referenced regarding this configuration or setup.

Did this article resolve your issue ?
Legacy Knowledge Base
Did this article resolve your issue ?