External Drives Locked. Permissions grayed out

Ever since upgrading to SL, my external FW800 drives have been locked to 'read only'. When I open the 'Get Info', the option to unlock or change permissions has been disabled. I can unlock the disks by running Disk Warrior, but each time I restart, the disks are locked again. Is this a bug?

Run Disk Utility and Repair Disk Permissions.
Launch Disk Utility. (Applications/Utilities) Select MacintoshHD in the panel on the left, select FirstAid, then click: Repair Disk Permissions. Quit DU when it's finished and reboot.
Carolyn

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Can't Re-Install Lion from Recovery HD - Internal Drive Locked and Grayed Out

I can't boot into Lion on my Macbook Pro. I can boot into Bootcamp. When I'm in Bootcamp, using MacDrive, I can access all my files on my main Lion partition. I can also boot into the Recovery HD. From there I can get to Disk Utility which tells me that I need to repair my Lion partition. When I run the repair, it tells me it can't be repaired.
Given that I can still access all my files from Bootcamp, I tried to re-install Lion using that selection from the Recovery HD menu. It verifies my Lion copy over the internet. But when it asks me to designate the drive that I want to re-install Lion on, the drives (Bootcamp, Recovery and Mac) are all grayed out and all say "Disk is Locked". I'd rather not reinstall from my Time Capsule back up because of the time involved, the fact that the backup is a week old and because I dropped the !@#$ external drive with the back up on it yesterday and I don't trust it (it's making weird noises).
I've tried booting up in safe mode and ctrl-sys-r-p but all that happens is hours of watching the wheel spin. I had not set up File Vault so it shouldn't be for want of a File Vault password.
Any idea how I can unlock the drive to at least try to re-install Lion?

Thanks for the idea. I do have another Macbook at home although it's quite a bit older and I've only upgraded it to Snow Leopard, but I'll certainly give it a try. I've already tried what would seem to be about the same thing with, unfortunatley, no luck. I have an old hard drive (running Snow Leopard) that used to be the internal drive in my Macbook Pro. When I pulled it out, I stuck it in an enclosure. When this problem cropped up, I plugged it into the Macbook Pro that's giving me grief (via USB), booted up on the enclosed drive, and ran the disk utility off of that drive against the current internal HD of the Macbook Pro. All I got was the "can't be repaired" message.

Time Machine not backing up 2nd external drive, remove option grayed out

I have two external hard drives, 300gb (firewire) and 500gb (usb). Time Machine is backing up to the 300gb. In Time Machine's options, the 500gb is excluded from being backed up, and the remove option is grayed out.
The 300gb Time Machine Backup drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended. The 500gb drive is formatted as MS-DOS (FAT32).
I know the backup drive needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended, but will it not even back up other drives that are FAT32?

I am having a similar problem. I initially set it up 3 days ago and had it back up just the iMac to Time Capsule (about 120 GB) which it did no problem (I initially had my LaCie drive excluded). I then un-excluded my other drive, where all my photos and music reside (about 130 GB). Since then, it keeps trying to back up about 102 GB each time. Looking at the list of backups it does not appear that it has ever successfully backed up the LaCie. I am not aware of any error messages, but I have not been home much. I normally shut down the computer at night but I have been leaving it on trying to let Time Machine do its thing. All I can say is that every time I am at the computer TM is running and it always looks like it is in the middle of backing up 102 GB (usually seems to be near the beginning, never seem to see it more than halfway done). Looking at the TM panel it says the latest backup was 2 days ago. I'd appreciate any advice!

The 'Get Information' button in my printer driver dialog is grayed out. This happened when I upgraded my mac (and macbook). Can't find any help anywhere.

I recently upgraded both my imac and macbook pro to a new mac mini and macbook air. I have a networked (via airport extreme) canon ipf6100 printer that had been working great from my older computers (all running current mountain lion). The new computer's printer driver setups went well and the dialog says its online and ready. The problem is the 'Get Information' button in the 'Main' driver panel is grayed out. The driver cannot read the printer's configuration (i.e. roll or sheet paper) and therefore cannot print correctly. I have tried re-installing the driver (current one from Canon's website) and have tried connecting the printer to USB directly with the same result. I have not been able to find any help on this anywhere. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks,
-jim

Hi Jim, no idea really, but...
Mac OS X: About the Reset Printing System feature ...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1341?viewlocale=en_US
10.5/10.6/10.7 instructions...
In System Preferences>Fax & Print, Right click or Control+click on the Printers list Sidebar, choose Reset Printing System.
if you hold option and click the "-" tab it resets the printing system.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031215144430486
Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions.
Any devices that previously appeared in your Printer List and Fax List will need to be added again after resetting the printing system.
Resetting the printing system in Mac OS X 10.5.x+++
To use the Reset Printing System feature in Mac OS X 10.5.x, follow these steps:
Choose System Preferences from the Apple menu.
Choose Print & Fax from the View menu.
Control-click on list of printers on the left side of the window, then choose "Reset printing system" from the contextual menu. If you don't see a list of printers, Control-click on the text "Click + to add a printer or fax" and select "Reset printing system..."
As an alternative, if you currently have one or more printers listed, you can Option-click the "-" (Remove printer) button.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1341
Reboot.

Apple Senior tech lady deleted all my external drive data while sorting out other problem. How can I restore all my photos , music etc back to my Mac Pro?(I am so scared, I haven't connected to sync! Please help)

Apple Senior tech lady deleted all my external drive data while sorting out other problem. How can I restore all my photos , music etc back to my Mac Pro?(I am so scared, I haven't connected iPhone to sync! Please help)

It was tele tech. I couldn't open my Page Numbers etc. Frist tech chat idiot - following dumping few things in bin, asked me yo upgrade to Yosemite. But the problem still persists. This morning I was asked to do it via telephone and like yesterday, after wasting 20 min, I was put to this apparent Tech Queen ( my foot!). She eventually decided to reinstall Yosemite asked me to connect my external drive while I connected to her. She was moving cursor asking me to move files and delete and I followed her like a dummy. It took 3/4 hours and she called me 3 times once the lengthy process was completed. I suspected from the beginng for the fact that why should be asking me to click all my backup from the very beginning! Eventually she said I deleted... Or someone else or may be my children ! It was a blatant lie. I run my small business from home and I was simply staying in front of the Mac whole day! Children were at school. Then she said I must have used another computer! I only have laptop and the iPad. I will talk to their manager first thing in the morning. In the mean time please let me know as to how can I transfer photos, music etc back to my laptop from my Iphone and IPad .? I am will connect to laptop as I am worried the new BLANK iPhoto may supersede iphone/iPad stuff? Will it? Please let me know. I am not a very tech savvy person. My son who could help me, is in Manchester Uni and Inam in London.

Repair Permissions Grayed Out On External Drive

I was having some strange issues with my firewire disk in Final Cut Pro so I decided to repair the premissons using disk utility. For some reason "repair premissions" is grayed out. I did a repair disk and everything showed to be fine, but repair premissions is still grayed out.
Any idea what's going on? Or what I should do?
Thanks.

Rick,
Did you ever solve this problem? I'm having the exact same issue. I have a Late 2011 MBP 17" with the i7 2.5. I have 16GB RAM installed and a Samsung 830 250GB SSD in the original HD spot with a 750GB Hybrid drive in the optibay. When a heavy load is being placed on the 750gb drive, it'll unmount and I will get the "didn't eject" error. I have to turn it off for about 5 minutes then boot it to have the drive recognized again. I especially notice this when I'm running VMWare Fusion along with my Mac and the Windows side is having to do some "hard" work.

External Drive locked after time machine restore. Please help

I've restored my Mac OS x (10.6.8) from a time machine backup after reformatting the iMac's hard drive.
After restoring all my files the external drive that time machine uses is locked and I cannot seem to get it to unlock itself.
I've tried resetting the permissions on the "get info" panel without any success (Did a restart after every change- it just seems to go back to custom priviledges). I've also toggled the "Ignore Ownership" toggle on and off- again followed by a restart each time.
I have no idea as to what else I can do.
The external drive is connected by Firewire 800 and is a RAID 1 configuration using two 2Tb drives.
I don't want to lose my existing time machine files on that external disc- hense formatting it is out of the question..
Any ideas or suggestions would be most appreciated.

Thanks for the reply guys.
Unfortunately none of what you said was helpful ds store. **** of a lot of effort and risk to go through just to get the drive unlocked. It might work though.
baltwo, thanks for the link. Those computer lingo sentances scare me big time. I'm a photographer, not some IT junkie! Thanks for the link as that got me reading some other posts and I then came accross other variations of " a+rx" that work for some but not for others. Sounded a bid dubios to me, especially since I'll have absolutely no clue as to what to do if things do go pear shape.
Nevertheless, I found the best sullution: a small app called BatChmod. (http://www.lagentesoft.com/)
Yeah, just what I needed!

Repair disk permissions grayed out

Hello,
I have a WD External Drive that I use for Time Machine backup. Recently have had no backup (about 20 days) and finally decided to look into it. I use this one at work and have brought it home to work on what is wrong. Have tried to repair disk permissions, but option is grayed out. I have however been able to repair disk. It took 8 hours to repair disk which reported no problems.
I have tried to copy files from the backup disk to another disk, but it won't work (don't remember exact message-but it was something odd).
From another thread, I was trying to do this command:
sudo /usr/sbin/chown _installer:admin /Library/Receipts/db/a.receiptdb
and got this response:
Home-Power-Mac-G5:~ paul$ sudo /usr/sbin/chown _installer:admin /Library/Receipts/db/a.receiptdb
Password:
paul is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
so, I then try this command:
ls -leO /Library/Receipts/db/a.receiptdb
and get this response:
-rw------- 1 _installer wheel - 266133504 Dec 15 22:03 /Library/Receipts/db/a.receiptdb
WHAT do I do now? I want to first back up all files then reformat drive to start anew.

Hi Christopher Graham;
Since Repair Permission is repair the permissions for the system there has to be a system on the partition in order to not have that button ghosted. As far as Disk Utility can tell a Time Machine backup is not a System hence it is ghosted.
Allan

External Drives Locked

I know this has been discussed quite a bit but I cannot seem to get things right. I have been trying all of the Terminal codes to no avail. I was hoping someone might be able to help me out. Here is where I am at. I have 3 Lacie External drives that are locked. I cannot access them at all
Get Info.
Greg (Me) CUSTOM
Greg (Me) CUSTOM
(unknown) CUSTOM
everyone CUSTOM
In terminal I ran:
lO@ed /Volumes/600_Gig
And Got:
drw-rw-r--@ 17 Greg Greg uchg 646 Dec 9 10:20 /Volumes/600_Gig
com.apple.FinderInfo 32
0: user:Greg allow list,addfile,addsubdirectory,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity
Please, if anyone can help with this, I would be very greatful. These drives are not backed up. I know they should be, but if anyone can help me out, that would be awesome.
Thanks!
Greg Kuhn

Run Disk Utility and Repair Disk Permissions.
Launch Disk Utility. (Applications/Utilities) Select MacintoshHD in the panel on the left, select FirstAid, then click: Repair Disk Permissions. Quit DU when it's finished and reboot.
Carolyn

ITunes Media on External drive locked, internal - okay

First I am running OSX 10.8.3 & iTunes 11.02. I have split my iTunes library being that I have ripped a significant amount of my DVD & BluRay collection. I keep the Movie & TV media on a 6TB external drive while the music on the internal 1TB drive. Recently I haven't been able to fill in any of the meta data in the 'get info' of the movie & TV files. They are greyed out. The music files on the other hand are fine and I can edit them to my hearts content. Here's a screen shot of my movies Info folder:
This is basically the same permissions as the rest of the system, internal start up drive as well. Except for my home folder and everything included (e.g. Music, Pictures, etc.) which is as follows:
It leads me to believe this as more of a permissions issue rather than an iTunes issue. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
(This permissions thing is a real downer)

Copy the iTunes Library.itl file from the old computer. iTunes can handle a change in drive letters as long as the relative paths from the database to the media is the same - typically where you have an iTunes folder (preferably in the root of the external drive) that contains both the iTunes Library.itl file and the iTunes Media folder, as follows:
See turingtest2's user tip on Make a split library portable for steps that may be necessary to bring your library into this layout.
Then, hold down SHIFT as you start iTunes, and when you see this prompt:
click on Choose Library..., navigate to the iTunes folder on your external drive, and select the iTunes Library.itl file.
Note also that the iTunes Media folder location setting in Edit > Preferences > Advanced does not provide iTunes information about the location of your library (that info is all within the database file). This setting is used, in conjunction with the Keep iTunes Media folder organized setting, to determine where iTunes stores new media when you add it to your library.
Once everything's sorted out, use a second external drive to create and maintain a backup of your library.

My external iPhoto folder is grayed out - how can I open it in iPhoto?

My old Seagate external drive which had my iPhoto folder died but we were able to move a copy from my TimeMachine to my new LeCie external harddrive.
But now when I try to open iPhoto and then point to the LeCia folder for my iPhoto Library - the folder is grayed out. But all 194.4GB is in the iPhoto Library.
How can I may the iPhoto Library not gray so I can open this in iPhoto?
Thanks

Got it fixed! The Folder was set to Open With Terminal!
Maybe when you moved it over from your other system, the Open With got changed? To change this, in your Finder, select the iPhoto library from your User/Pictures folder and do a Get Info on it Command+I.
Then change the Open With to iPhoto application!
Then from the Finder, double click the iPhoto Folder and it will be opened with iPhoto! WALLA it worked!

Internal Hard Drive Boot Failure leaves external drives locked

My three week old Mac Pro decided not to restart this morning. It's a long story, but after consulting with Apple Support I had to do a clean install. After restoring my system I discovered that two of my external My Book drives are now locked. These came from my old PPC setup. They mount on the desktop, but I can't open the drives. Permissions are set to custom and a little lock appears on the drive icon. Two other drives, a Maxtor and Acomdata are not affected. It's the same with either FireWire or USB. The support specialist said it's because those drives use Apple Partition Map (APM) instead of GUID. I can read the drives if I log on as Root Administrator, but I can't write to them nor change permissions. This was not an issue up until today's failure. The support spec. basically said that I would have to reformat. These are my media backup drives and I'll have to purchase an additional 1 TB to temporarily move the data. Does anyone know about this issue of APM vs GUID? Thanks.

Search is indeed my friend. I found this thread which solved my problem
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7453782&#7453782

Verify/repair permissions grayed out in disk utility

I recently replaced my main hard drive and now when I go into Disk Utility the option to verify and repair disk permissions is not available on the other drives that were in the machine before the upgrade
I am thinking it's a permission issue but not sure what needs to be set to fix it

No problem. It puzzled me for a while. Now I check it every time I format a drive since DU doesn't correctly set the permissions needed. It's a pain that when you clone one startup drive to another, say for backup, and erase the destination in advance that the drive's ownership and permissions will be wrong. Then you try repairing permissions like the OP did and find those options are grayed out, and you are staring at the monitor trying to figure out why. PITA.

TC and WD500 External drive - Locks up when copying large files

I have a TC with a Western Digital 500GB my Book connected to the USB port on the TC that I use for network Storage. Everything works fine until I try to copy large files or directories from the Finder mounted share. After the copy freezes the external drive can no longer be seen by airport utility. If I look at disks it sees the disk but no partition. I have to power cycle the external drive to have TC see the drive again. Then I disconnect the drive and plug it in directly to the MAC and run disk utility and his repairs the journal. I have to do the repair every time it locks up. Should the external drive be formatted different or does it have to be connected to a USB hub. Or is this just a bug with the TC and afp ?

I have this very same problem.
I tried to copy a 4GB+ folder from the Macbook to the 500GB MyBook attached to my TC and it froze.
Now the the files on the MyBook are invisible when attached to the TC ("0 Items") but are available when the drive is connected directly to the Macbook. I have run disk utility but it hasn't helped. The disk is FAT 32 formatted and the files on the MyBook are still invisible over the network.
When the drive attached to the Macbook directly I can see a 'phantom' file with the same title as the 4GB+ folder I'd tried to copy. This file is "ZERO KB" and it cannot be deleted (error code -43).
Anyone have a clue what is happening here?

Unable to repair External Drive disk permissions

I have an external harddrive which holds my itunes library. Today I have been getting permission errors and now my itunes won't access the files on the drive.
I have tried to fix the errors with disk utility but now when I try to repair it I get the error: Could not unmount the disk.
Now I can't even see the iTunes folder on the external drive (I can see others) but I know it is there as 150GB of data is unaccounted for.

I had the same problem with my Time Machine backup disk and was able to solve it without the serious computer calisthenics recommended by others on the web. I'm running Snow Leopard on an intel iMac and using an external Seagate drive. Here's how I got it fixed.
1. Unmounted the drive and unplugged it.
2. Plugged it back in after a decent interval to let the disk spin down.
3. Shut down the iMac and restarted it a few minutes later (hard reset).
4. THE DISK DID NOT SHOW UP IN FINDER. Because I had a lot of work to do, I postponed further systems programming.
5. After about 20 minutes, my Norton utilities found it and began to search it. It was back in finder with r/w permissions for me and everybody else.
Hope this helps.

External drives "locked" after restart

My iMac is acting very strangely: after a restart, an external drive (or more) may suddenly become "locked" for no apparent reason. Just restarted and got an error message that it could not complete a Time Machine backup because it is on a "locked Volume".
Running "repair" in Disc Utility fixes the issue, although it never reports any actual problem on the volume.
I have also started having kernel panics, which I think may be related.
Any idea what might be causing this?

Hello, see how many of these you can answer...
See if the Disk is issuing any S.M.A.R.T errors in Disk Utility...
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH7029
Open Activity Monitor in Applications>Utilities, select All Processes & sort on CPU%, any indications there?
How much RAM & free space do you have also, click on the Memory & Disk Usage Tabs.
Open Console in Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.
In the Memory tab, are there a lot of Pageouts?

External Drives Locked. Permissions grayed out

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