Cannot change permissions to external hard drives

My usb partitions are all set to "custom" permissions and they cannot be changed no matter what I have tried. I tried creating new Administrator accounts but I cannot assign any new accounts or settings to the partitions. They merely appear on the desktop with a lock icon on them.
What caused this issue is I wanted to remove the annoying "unknown user" under permissions for an external partition. It would not allow me to do that so I tried to apply disk permissions to "all enclosed items". This did not help either so I tried repairing disk permissions and it appeared to start to fix a trillion disk permission errors that would take 2 hours estimated to do so. It suggested canceling and reinstalling the OS after backing up your files.
So I took that suggestion, cancelled the repairing process, but was not able to back up my files because of this change to the partitions that all now appear with a lock.
I have a feeling it will require some Terminal commands to reapply new permissions to the partitions, which I would need help doing.
Thanks for any assistance.

you should never use "apply to enclosed items" on a system drive or on system created folders. that includes the Applications folder, your home directory, your desktop folder etc. Use it only on folders you create yourself. to unlock the external drives you need to run the following terminal commands (copy and paste please)
sudo chflags nouchg /Volumes/"drive name"
sudo chmod 775 /Volumes/"drive name"
Put the name of the affected drive in the above. KEEP the quotes. You'll be prompted to enter your admin password (which you won't see). that's normal.

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First question, since you made
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Hi everyone,
This is my first time posting on this forum and am really hoping for some help! I have a 2006 PowerBook G4 that is running iPhoto and Time Machine, and I've used an external hard drive to backup everything on the computer via Time Machine. When I plug the external hard drive into my newer 2010 MacBook Pro, I follow this path to try to access the photos:
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One other thing I tried was opening iPhoto on my MacBook Pro and going to File > Browse Backups... which essentially opens Time Machine and shows me the photos on my MacBook Pro but gives me no option to view them from my External Hard Drive.
Any super users out there willing to lend me some help?
Thanks!

The iPhoto Library is a Time Machine backup, and so cannot be used as the main library. Relaunch iPhoto with <option> key held down to choose another   library.
You can have an iPhoto library on an external drive and use it from different machines
and you can have a Time Machine backup
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Well - first, I shut down iTunes and restarted it, the external drive was still in the Preferences. I shut down the computer, and restarted it, the Preferences reverted.
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- What version of the Operating System.
- Details. As full a description of the problem as you can. For example, if you have a problem with exporting, then explain by describing how you are trying to export, and so on.
- History: Is this going on long? Has anything been installed or deleted? - Are there error messages?
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likely a dead SATA bridge card, very common
verify on another Mac however
Never again be in a position of a single backup of vital data. Ever.
see about your likely fault here:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD

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I recently formatted the hard drive to do a fresh install of Mavericks on my Macbook Pro Retina. I then formatted my Western Digital 2 TB External Hard Drive for Time Machine. I then began storing others files and folders on the external hard drive along side the TIme Machine Backup folder. Everytime I added a folder or changed a foler name it asked for my password.
This has never happened to me before using any other OSX.
I apologize if this has been resolved before, I'm new to the communities and have yet to find a solution.

It is not a good idea to be storing other Stuff on your Time Machine drive. You may need an additional separate hard drive for those things.
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ld3mb wrote:
Thanks everyone. I suppose I'll just reformat for Apple. I need to use it for large files, and I suppose I could survive without editing ablities on Windows.
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I have searched for the answer to this high and low without success if someone can help...
I have a large collection of photos that I store on an external firewire hard drive (too many to store on my macbook pro). My iphoto library is on my Mac and when importing photos to iphoto I did not import the files so the originals remain on the external hard drive and are therefore linked to in iphoto.
I did it this way, rather than storing the library database on the external drive, so that I could access the information and thumbnails when travelling and not connected to my external drive.
I've upgraded my external hard drive and it will have a different name. I need to transfer all the photos across to the new hard drive.
Is there a quick way to reconnect all my original photos when transferred to the new hard drive or a better way to transfer them? Having tried to copy them across manually, obviously as expected I get a missing photo exclamation mark and am asked to browse to the file to relink. This is OK to reconnect one or two photos, but would take me forever with 17,000.
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I just wanted to close this off to say that my solution worked fine and my iphoto libraries are up and running in perfect order again. And to summarise the solution so you don't have to read the entire post above.
This solution is for those wanting to have the iphoto library on your Mac and store the original photos linked elsewhere on an external / network drive (i.e. not imported into the iphoto library). Then you want to change the location where the originals are stored (say for example you get a new bigger external Hard Drive - like I did), and that new location will have a different name. Most people recommend importing the photos into the iphoto library, keeping everything together, and this can then be moved anywhere and accessed.
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1. Back up everything you can first...
2. First try moving the files (not copying and deleting) - the aliases may reconnect, especially if they are on your main HD. You may need to manually reconnect one file in each sub-directory.
3. Move your photos to your external HD / network drive. Note if the new place has the same name as your old external HD then the aliases probably won't need to be fixed.
4. Download and install File Buddy or similar Alias 'fixer'
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8. Finally, move this now fixed "Originals" folder back into your iphoto library (package contents) - writing over / replacing the original "Originals" directory.
All being well, should be fixed!
Just to share with you the benefits I find of having my photos stored on an external HD and the iphoto library on my Macbook:
-- Saves space on my limited internal HD
-- others can access the photos, set up and manage their own iphoto libraries pointing at the same originals, and we don't need two copies of the original files
-- I can access the iphoto library and manage albums, add keywords, titles, etc when not connected to the External HD, though you're limited to viewing the (not too small) thumbnail pictures iphoto stores in its library
I'm loving iphoto even more now, it makes managing and viewing my 1000's of photos a pleasure.
Cheers
Phil

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I'm having the same issue.
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Strange,
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Thank you for your reply and kind welcome.
That's a great tip, but that box was already checked, so I'm afraid that wasn't a solution. The problem ended up "solving itself" after I left my machine off for the day while I went to work. I may never know why that error occurred, but I certainly don't care, as long as it doesn't happen again. Take care.

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Cannot change permissions to external hard drives

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